ONE DAY IN BANGKOK

I step out of the air-conditioned comfort of the car and into the steamy streets of Bangkok.

We have been traveling for 16 hours, although the flight to Kuala Lumpur from Sydney is only 7 hours we missed our connection to Bangkok so we had to attempt to sleep at the airport. I say attempt, because every 5 minutes a chime and announcement has gone off waking me… the only food I have eaten was on the plane, it looked like Chicken Tonight but tasted like Chicken Last Month.

I am ruined… no sleep, dirty, hungry and dazed. 

I read that it is customary to tip in Thailand so as we check in to the hotel I start handing out money to everyone we come in contact with, like a deranged Larry David I hand out Baht like it was candy… The staff doesn’t know why I am doing it, but hey if there is a crazy westerner handing out cash then just go with it!

There is no time to rest, the bags are unceremoniously dumped in the room and it’s onto the street to find out where we are and what is about to eat.

My food hero, the person that inspires me to cook is Anthony Bourdain. While I have never met him, nor eaten a morsel he has produced, his writing and philosophy about food is my mantra for this trip…. As I walk out of my hotel and stand on the street this quote of his comes to mind:

“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”

Luckily our hotel is right in the thick of local cuisine… there is no Big Mac, no Sandwich, only the best local cuisine Bangkok has to offer…

The streets are full of life undulating to an unseen pulse, from every telephone pole run hundreds of cables, twisting and melding into a beast reminisant of H.R. Geiger’s Alien.

A few steps down the street we encounter a dark alley with food stalls and dingy doorways lining the streets. Lured by the smoky smells of a million types of roasting meats we abandon any thoughts of staying on the beaten track and indulge in the dark and exotic treats the streets have to offer…

We eat a fish, salt and chili hit like a brick… I want more.

Have noodles at a little shop… want more

Thai sausages and offal on a stick…. More please…

We decide that we need to get the lay of the land…. Get an overview of Bangkok….

So we get into a Tuk Tuk and meet a man called Mr Kum… a man that will be the most amazing and insane person I have ever met.

You need a friend in every town so after driving around for an hour with Mr Kum we decide he is our kind of people… why take a chance… we come up with a price for him to drive us around Bangkok for the next 3 days and like a deal with the devil we are off… and what was to come was more than anyone expected!

We want to buy some crap… Mr Kum tells us that the weekend markets are the place to be and proceeds to take us off the back streets of Bangkok and into the chaotic ballet that is Thai driving.

There are no road rules.

There are only road suggestions.

4000 cars and motorcycles all driving at 100 km an hour down the same street bound only by the color of the lights.

Just go as fast and as hard as you can until you reach your objective… while Mr Kum speaks little English we ask him if he has seen many car accidents…. He smiles and nods…. “Yeah!”

The weekend markets lay before us like a Little Chiba from a William Gibson novel,

10,000 stalls set up on the day that take the shape of a makeshift city.

As we plunge headlong down the first corridor the temperature soars to over 40 degrees, I look for a landmark, anything that will point me to the 1.30 pm meeting point that Mr Kum and I have agreed upon, but as fast as I am devoured by the crowd so is my sense of direction or any semblance I had of where I was.

The next few hours is a blur, the following things happen, though not necessarily in this order…. tight stuffy corridor and steamy heat… listen to insane Bangkok style Brian Jonestown Massacre sounding music played by a 5 year old boy on what looks like a homemade sitar…  30000 smells from lemongrass to sewerage and everything in between…

see what I think is a dead cat in cage… I buy rock t-shirts… watch people stand and laugh as squirrels on a string jump at the crowd…  purchase 8 hologram place mats…

find an oasis in the heat for a soda and a tea…

a man with a makeshift prosthetic leg passes me singing into a mic with a horned amp around his neck. It sounds strangely melancholy like a hobbit singing a whale song… I look for an exit…

see a dog with shoes on….

And I am free….

Adorned in shitty trinkets and dripping with rivulets of sweat we make a break for the security of Mr Kum’s Tuk Tuk which is parked outside the entrance… he smiles and accelerates shambolically inserting us into Bangkok traffic…. We ask to go back to our hotel and after ten or so harrowing moments we arrive… my wife wants a massage and I am left without a purpose.

Mr Kum smiles and asks me out for a drink… I readily acknowledge and I am whisked into a side ally that seems to have 20 of Mr Kums long lost friends. I happily lay down the $12 to buy everyone a drink.

We sit in the gutter, on the side of a busy street. They all talk in Thai and every now and then include me in what I hope is a joke. I could not ask for more. I feel like one of the gang. 

Time for lunch, I ask my friend where to go… he points down a street with no name that I have dubbed Fish Street because of its abundance of seafood.

We walk for a while and breathe in the way of life before coming to a place that strikes our interest… live fish… live prawns…. And a view of an Iranian Disco…

Time for lunch… 

We order many Singas, which is part of any meal, and quickly proceed to eat the famous dish Tom Yum Gong which is a fire of a soup packed with prawns, squid and fish….

BBQ River Prawns with a Green Chilli Dip….

Steamed Fish in Garlic and Chilli….

After and hour of eating and drinking I am truly done. 

The heat, the sights, smells and experience has left me swooning.

We retreat to the hotel for a dip in the rooftop pool….

And lucky for us it’s happy hour… This means that one drink turns into many Majitos.

After we are done we retire to our room for only the briefest of moments to shower and change… there is no helping yourself… time for more food, more drinks and as much trouble as you can handle.

Anthony Bourdain does an episode of No Reservations about Bangkok…. One of the restaurants that he eats in is a little know place in Chinatown that is reputed to do one of the best suckling pigs in Asia.

Armed only with a picture of a pig and a heart full of enthusiasm we ask Mr Kum to take us to Chinatown…

When we arrive it is like a scene from Crocodile Dundee…. You think you have a Chinatown, now this is a Chinatown!

 The street stretches before us… the restaurants are not contained by the clientele or even the sidewalk…. Most spread into at least the first lane of oncoming traffic… as a first timer one can only feel like a twig in the arms of a mighty river… you have to relax and go with the flow.

After seeing sight after sight we check directions, find out they were wrong, follow our new advice, find out they don’t even know what they are talking about and continue this for the next hour.

After walking up and back and not understanding, we are ready to give up. I am hungry, over it and feeling the fool.

As we walk to the pick up location we have negotiated with Mr Kum we pass a side street. With nothing to lose we walk down and take a right.

And all of a sudden it appears.

A locals only place we are not welcomed with open arms, when we see the suckling pig pictured on the board and ask for a serve. In fact, a table is cleared of diners who are drinking and eating and we a motioned to sit here.

We point to the suckling pig, our waitress looks at us with secpticism and walks back to the kitchen to place the order.

The man at the table opposite us smiles as if we have done something right.

Anthony Bourdain got to go into the kitchen and watch the pig being cooked, and though I am neither famous nor qualified I politely ask if I can go and watch our pig being cooked. I walk down the back ally of the restaurant and enter the realm of the Roman God Vulcan.

Volcanic heat and chaos surround what I envision and I am lucky enough to watch our Chefs spin the sucking pig above a blasting furnace until the skin is golden crisp.

The pig is presented on a platter; its skin has taken on the texture of glass, the fat bubbling and oozing beneath. We eat the skin with pancakes, scallions, Hossien sauce and Chilli… a kick ass Peking Pig….

As we start to demolish this exotic treat another Western couple arrive at the restaurant… the Waitress looks stressed and immediately points them to sit at the table with us…

We smile and as they approach say… “Bourdain?”

Instantly they beam with recognition and agree… they, like us have made the 10,000 mile pilgrimage to eat what the guru says is good….

For the next hour we eat, we drink, we relate…

All in all a most amazing experience….

We are running late to meet Mr Kum so we pay the bill and dash back to our Tuk Tuk… a drink is in order…

We ask Mr Kum to take us to a bar he likes… when we arrive we ask him to join us… at first he is a little taken aback but then sits down and joins us….

Time to drink so I offer to pay for the first round… I ask Mr Kum what he wants; instead off ordering a drink he orders a bottle of Whiskey… I would be offended but it cost $9 dollars Australian and he seems happy…. We all drink and over the course of the next hour Mr Kum becomes SHITFACED!

We jump back into the Tuk Tuk and ask to go back to the hotel…. Mr Kum laughs and shakes his head driving in the total opposite direction… he flows in and out of the river of traffic ahead of him occasionally turning back to us, laughing and screaming with laughter “TOOT TOOT”.

 After about 20 minutes swerving through the streets of Bangkok Mr Kum takes a hard right and pulls up with a sudden stop in a deserted and poorly lit car park. He points to an alley and tells us to go down.

As we walk down the alley, lit only by a flickering fluorescent bulb I get my first and only taste of fear in Bangkok… this is a white slavery alley… a rape corridor.

At the end a group of rowdy men congregate… there is a table and when we reach it we are asked for a 1000 Baht each…. I know what Mr Kum has in mind for us… at least I thought I had heard what I thought Mr Kum had in store for us.

The next 15 minutes I will leave to your imagination… at the end we walk out, whiter than before and trying to find humour in the fact that what we saw done to Savage Garden will make the song different from now on…

Mr Kum has finished the Whiskey and is now drinking beers… we smile and ask to go home.

We know what “TOOT TOOT” means.

It is 10.30pm.