It's always an experience at least. A city that never fails to chew up it's first time visitors. And this time was no different. The highlights without naming names, of either victims or predators, this time include:
- The loss of almost 10,000 baht to a drunken hour in a club.
- The extortion of 1,000 baht by a 13 year old girl for two bags of corn (thrown with her hand clutching ours before we could stop her) with which to feed the bangkok pigeons.
- Two ten minutes sessions pretending, in order to secure a kick back for our driver, that we were interested in having more suits tailored for us than a stick could be shaken at. (Why we didn't employ the use of a four letter expletive spelled with an F, a C, a K and a U closely followed by an OFF I can't say/remember/invent a reason for.
- The procurement of some excellent forged press credentials. Just because we could. You never know.
- And finally, a 12 hour bus trip which began with our meeting a young Serbian father of one who now resides on Ko Pha Ngan and the story he told us about the young driver who last took him from Bangkok to Chumpon and how he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed. He also took pictures of this and showed them to us, laughing, saying how he wasn't hurt because the left side of the bus impacted the tree, that he was on the right and that the only reason the entire vehicle didn't descend into a ravine was it's reflection by this tree. He then showed us a picture of himself giving two thumbs up, smiling, in a hole in the side of the crashed bus. He then identified the driver of our bus as the same young man who had crashed the previous week.
And that last point brings me neatly to where I am now. A long bus, a long sit and a long boat away from that cesspit of wonders that is Bangkok and down to where it's at. Where I can make it to the heart of things. Off which I shall dive tomorrow and any other day that lets me. Where I can't stop being tortured by beauty. Koh Tao.
No comments:
Post a Comment