Ordered chaos

Posted by Heidi

Friday morning we woke up to incoherant ramblings from a megaphone in the street, and had the hotel's included breakfast. It was nothing to write home about, although the room temperature milk was the most plentiful it had been the entire trip, and we were each given a small carton worth, rather than the normal thimble size. Ryan had an appointment with the suit guys to check on how it was coming along so we all hopped in a cab. This ended up being our most scary ride of the trip, and our closest call with death. The cabbie was a wannabe race driver with a bad case of road rage. He weaved in and out of the traffic without indicating, drove on the opposite side of the road in front of oncoming traffic, and swerved side to side to intimidate/take revenge on fellow cab drivers. Without seatbelts in the back you can only hang onto your seats for dear life, literally.

We got out shakily at the suit place, unexpectedly in one piece, and vowed to not get a Bangkok taxi again. After Ryan tried on his suit (he looked very dashing, even though it was only half made), we hopped on the Skytrain to get around town, which was a helluva lot safer than in a cab down on the roads below. We stopped for some cute mini cupcakes (and a beer for Ryan) while Chris swapped over his pants (he was a bit big for the ones he'd bought the day before, probably due to his excessive eating during the trip (Chris: I blame the dodgy Thai factory workers)), and travelled down to Saphan Taksin station on the river to get on a ferry up to Chinatown. The river was quite brown, similar to the Brisbane river, so I'm told (Chris: bloody Ryan, the Brisbane river is blue now!). We got off at Ratchawong Pier, and explored Chinatown. It was complete mayhem - crowded streets, constant traffic, horns beeping, traffic cops blowing their whistles incessantly, and in the thick of it was a maze of little alleys full of people and little shops selling absolutely everything. We tried looking for a bar where we could stop and try and get our bearings and work out where we should have lunch, but there ain't no bars in Chinatown. You've just gotta keep shuffling along at all times. So we pulled to the side and our trusty Lonely Planet recommended the Shangrilah as a good dining spot. We retreated upstairs in the safe, clean and air-con environment... we ate lots of steamed dumplings and yummy duck. We headed back out in search for an egg tart for Danae, but we couldn't find any.

We hopped back on the ferry to Chang Pier and walked back to the hotel in the sweltering heat through an ugly park swarming with rats with wings ie. pigeons. We were pretty happy to have made it back to the hotel without having to get a death cab. Unfortunately the 7-eleven next door to the hotel had a random rule where they didn't sell alcohol between 2 and 5 pm (we're still not sure why it's OK to buy it between 11am and 2pm though) so the boys had to go without Changs for a couple of hours. We were planning on going to a restaurant called the Flying Chicken that night, a crazy place Danae had read about where apparently BBQ chickens are flung through the air and caught on the pronged helmet of a child sitting on the shoulders of a man on a unicycle, or something, but it turned out it was going to be over an hour away, and we valued our lives too much to spend more than 2 hours travelling to this place in a death cab.

We decided to stay closer to home and catch a cab a shorter distance. We took another crazy cab ride into town. The taxi driver suddenly didn't know where we wanted to go so dropped us in the vague area, near Patpong. We found a bar to take the edge off the latest cab ride, and Danae and I had our most expensive cocktails thus far. And I can honestly say it was the worst cocktail of my life. it was a mix of Kahlua, coconut cream and pineapple juice, but something had gone slightly amiss with the coconut cream and it started to curdle. It resembled miso soup and then settled into 2 distinct layers, and remains the only cocktail I haven't finished in my life. As I waited for the food poisoning to kick in, we set off for the Banyan Tree hotel so we could go up the to the Moon Bar on the 61st floor. The most direct route there seemed to involve walking through the ER of Bangkok Christian Hospital for some reason, but anyway. We finally found the hotel, and went up to the top level which is the highest al fresco bar in the Asia Pacific. It was very plush, and the drinks were very expensive, but the view was amazing with sweeping vistas over the whole of Bangkok by night. Danae and I had a chocotini, the trip's best cocktail, and the boys had Johnny Walker Green Label.

After soaking up the view for all it was worth it was time to get back down into the thick of it again. On the way back to Patpong, Chris took a photo of Ryan in front of the Australian Embassy (where Ryan was gonna have to get a replacement passport), and was almost arrested by a Thai cop who grabbed Chris' wrist and got his supervisor. Despite proclaiming we were just Aussies, he had to delete the photo. We wandered through Patpong, a pretty seedy but touristy district full of a mix of restaurants and sex bars. There was lots of hassling in this district, and after stopping Ryan from following a man up an alleyway behind a van to "a good Thai restaurant" we found a safe air-con place for our last dinner. The food was kind of average, but we had a good time reflecting on the high and low points of our trip.

From there we walked back through Patpong, and the boys succumbed to a go-go bar for a "cultural experience" that they could tick off in their book so they weren't considered poofters (apparently). Danae and I opted for margheritas instead, although we were pretty amused and curious about the whole thing. The boys haggled their way into a bar for a cheap price and saw all sorts of wacky and very unsexy things which they may or may not choose to remember. All I know is that the following was involved, in no particular order: lady boys, picking up of bangles, egg show, fat Thai women (I didn't know there were any?!), sucking up of water in a Coke bottle, and disppointing ping pong tricks. Anyway, by the time they came back Ryan seemed quite disturbed and sat on the ground hugging his knees and rocking back and forth saying over and over "There's no place like home, there's no place like home". It was pretty late by then so we got another death cab back home, which is a lot less scary when you're very tired and have just had margheritas. We made it back safe again, and got dropped near enough to our hotel. We found our way back, and the boys got rejected one more time by 7-eleven coz it was after midnight so they couldn't buy a beer before bed. It's quite ironic (and inconvenient) what rules Thais actually take seriously. We were all dead tired anyway so we hit the hay for our last night of the trip.