I successfully made it to Bangkok, despite some concern that I would be refused by customs. To enter Thailand, a visitor is supposed to have either a visa or a round-trip ticket. I had neither, but nobody seemed to care either. This part of my journey finds me lighter of load. I left most of my belongings with some friends in Tokyo, carrying just an average sized duffel bag plus a small backpack. 

The first few days have been like the first ones in Tokyo. Using a guest house just off of the popular traveler's ghetto of Khao San Road as a base, I have been delighted to discover what must be the world's greatest food, most ornate temples, and most beautiful women. Soon after checking in, I opened my door to reveal a lovely Thai woman who asked me if I needed "help with my shower." I could definitely get used to this! However, I don't think she was thinking what I was thinking. It seemed that she was also on vacation from her family's farm in the North, and just wanted to welcome me to Thailand. Everyone else was warm and friendly as well. I've also met numerous people willing to help me find my way even before I started looking really lost. 

The purveyor of the guest house has been especially hospitable. Full of helpful advice, she has also included me in the meals served to her staff on several occasions. She serves wonderful authentic Thai cuisine, including a seafood soup that was delicate, flavorful, and spicy hot. 

Things are really cheap here. My private room with shower costs $4.80/day while a meal usually run about $1.50. There is also wonderful fresh fruit stands and food stalls everywhere. Pirated music tapes are also $1.50, so I picked up about a dozen tapes of random music. Catering to the hippie traveler group, the music vendors had loads of Grateful Dead and Bob Marley, but they also had dance music, heavy metal, and a blast from pop music's checkered past, "Milli Vanilli Gold Volume I." 

I hadn't gotten any vaccinations yet, so I visited the local Red Cross office the next day, where a Thai doctor speaking flawless English gave me a litany of pills and shots. He also warned me abut the dangers of contracting AIDS at the whorehouses and massage parlors. It was a warning I never forgot, even when parts of me wished I would. 

On Saturday, I went to the Grand Palace, surely one of the most beautiful complexes on earth. Photos do not do it justice, though I tried anyway. Among other amazing things, it is home of the emerald Buddha, a sitting likeness of the Buddha made entirely of emerald. Walking to another part of town, I watched mesmerized as traditional Thai dancers added gold leaves to an elephant statue in a Buddhist ritual. 

While watching the Thai dancers, I met a American who was on vacation from his restaurant in Taiwan. After returning to Khao San Road, we agree to meet later. That evening, Tom and I hired a three-wheeled taxi, or a tuk-tuk, and set out to discover the delights that have been attracting red-blooded males since long before Tim Rice and the boys from ABBA wrote "One Night in Bangkok." 

(Note: Many people have enjoyed the erotic pleasures of Bangkok, while many others are offended by the degradation of women that it often represents, and the near slavery that many of them live in. In my own clueless way, I was completely oblivious to not only the controversy, but the very existence of the Thai sex trade before arriving in Bangkok. At the time, I was simply surprised and amazed by it all. For those who would like to read more about the lives of Thai prostitutes, check out an excerpt from Cleo Odzer's book, "Patpong Sisters") 

Tuk-tuks are certainly interesting. Loud, polluting, no doubt dangerous little three wheeled taxis that are largely open to the elements, the drivers hurl them around Bangkok and other cities in Asia at high speed while weaving through traffic of other tuk-tuks, bicycles, and lots of large buses and trucks. It's one of the many forms of local transportation in Asia that has all the thrills of a roller-coaster without a track. 

Since we had started out kind of early, the sex shows hadn't started yet, or at least the ones at the bars that our driver got kickbacks from. So he took us to a hostess bar. It was much like the ones in Tokyo, except that the patrons were foreigners and the hostesses were natives and there was more for sale than just conversation. We chatted with a couple of women for about an hour and then it was time to board our little three wheeled lawnmower again for another wild ride down the crowded Bangkok streets. 

The next stop was another bar but with a stage in the middle. Surrounded mostly by foreign men, with a few European women in attendance, a series of women performed various strange activities. One woman opened a bottle of Coke with her private parts, emptied it into her vagina, walked around, then filled the Coke bottle back up. I ordered the Sprite. Another woman used her very powerful loins to launch peeled bananas across the room into the hands of a group of smiling Japanese businessmen while a third pulled a string of razor blades out of her body. 

The final stop was a massage parlor. A well dressed man with a pad of paper met us at the door of what looked like a warehouse, and he then led us down a hall to a large glass wall, which looked into a waiting room full of beautiful women in negligee. Each woman had a button with a different number on it, and we were expected to order our massage by the number. The women were smiling and waving at us. After contemplating the life-threatening possibilities of my actions, I kept my clothes on and went home to take the closest thing available to a cold shower in steamy Bangkok. 

Tuesday, March 3

I have done many things in the last couple of days. I got to eat a traditional Thai meal, watch another traditional Thai dance, and get scammed by a traditional Thai sapphire salesman. It started when I was walking down the street looking for a Buddhist festival. Apparently, I was looking gullible instead. It started while I was trying to find a Buddhist ceremony that was happening somewhere east of my guest house. As I was walking, this well-dressed man asked me if I was lost and announced that he was going to the same ceremony I was trying to find. He then started telling me about his lucrative business of buying gems in Bangkok and then reselling them to jewelry stores around the world. He then escorted me to his "contact" who gave me a five-minute lecture on how to tell good emeralds from bad ones, and went into a discussion on how easy it was to triple or quadruple my $500 to $2000 investment. To make a long boring story short and boring, I didn't buy any overpriced stones, never found the ceremony, and felt like I wasted much of the day. 

On the bright side, I met a Buddhist monk named Sompong who has been showing me around. He wants me to stay with him in the monastery so he can practice speaking English. So far, we have gone to a snake show, where handlers performed various scary looking feats with the dangerous animals. The show was part of a tour of the canals in Bangkok. Often called the Venice of the East, if the canals are as stinky in Venice as they are here, I'd say give them a miss. But we passed a number of beautiful temples and the houses were interesting, though in fairly poor condition.
 

I've moved into the monastery with Sompong. Living the life of an acetic, Sompong rises before sunrise each morning to walk through the open market outside the monastery. There, vendors give small parcels of food or money to support him in his studies. When he returns, several of us sit down for the morning meal. He then studies or meditates most of the day. The evenings are short, and then he rolls out a sheet onto the floor and goes to sleep. I'll say this for sleeping on the hard floor - it is easy to get up before dawn as sleep just isn't that much fun. There is a concrete room at the end of the building with a trough and a bucket for bathing. His hair is close cropped and he has almost no possessions. His room has no bed, chairs, or a table. The walls are covered with pictures of Buddha. 

But the monks command great respect in Thailand. Riding on a bus together, other Thai give up their seats on the back of the bus so that the monks can sit down. Though we were usually talking, Sompong did not want to create the wrong impression so we would sit quietly while on the bus. 

Yesterday, we took a bus to Ayuthaya, the ruins of the old capital. Some ruins date back to the 1300s. One tout tried to sell me some red glass as if it were a ruby, but he quickly slunk away after seeing I was with a monk. One ruin, of the great temple Mahathat, was truly impressive. 

The next day I went with another monk to see the gigantic orange-tiled Phra Pathom chedi, the tallest Buddhist monument in the world. Inside the several hundred foot structure was believe to be the smallest artifact (like a hair) of the Buddha. While we were enjoying the sightseeing, many others seemed to enjoy the sight of a monk and a foreigner walking and talking together. As long as we seemed fairly serious, no one seemed to mind, but when we were laughing loudly, some Thais looked uncomfortable. 

After our history lesson, we went for a little circus fun at the elephant and crocodile farm. The elephants were quite intelligent, and of course it was fun to watch crocodile wrestling. 

This monk has had quite an interesting life. He is actually from Laos, and is in Thailand illegally. But he pretends to be Thai and apparently speaks Thai perfectly. His English is also extremely good, and he claims that he can speak Laotian, Cambodian, and is working hard to master Japanese as well. In the evenings, he practices Thai kick-boxing, or Muy Thai. 

Sunday, March 8

My stay with the monks has come to an end. I've returned to the guest house on Khao San Road. Tomorrow, I will take the bus with my new friend Kutiya to her family's rice farm near Lampang, in the northern part of Thailand. More on all this in the next installment...