Bangkok. Step into chaos.

Bangkok - BKK

When I came to Bangkok in 1994, the airport was classic "developing country": small, crowded and noisy, hot and steamy with concrete walls, chipped tile floors and throngs of touts tugging at your sleeves to sel taxis and hotels, shaggy Euro-backpackers dozing in the corner. I haven't been living under a rock since then, so I've heard a lot about the Asian tigers and double-digit growth, but still I was staggered by the glittering, sterile, spidery mass of glass and steel that greeted me, at least as impressive as any outside Dubai (the current capitol of architectural excess), and the ribbons of multilane elevated highways that carried us to the city.

In the city, though, much was familiar - decrepit concrete buildings striped with elaborate stains and peeling paint (now sporting bristles of satellite dishes) over bustling markets immersed in a sea of human and mechanized traffic -- though the traffic had changed as well, from being dominated by the chainsaw roar of two-stroke rickshaws and the belchy rumble of Soviet-style disel trucks to the more-subtle rush of scintillating tertiary colored Japanese and Korean (chinese?)) taxis - magenta, lime green, and hot pink.


We head straight to Khao San Road, which is still a 365-24-7 open air festival for the international backpacker scene - and though it has both expanded and densified, it has also lost some of its seedy, desperate edge, mellowed out even -- even backpcker families are in evidence, toddlers as squirmy baggage -- though the physical space is as chaotic as ever, with sidewallks over-run by stalls, carts, and sprawling restaurants, with tourist vans, taxis, motorcycles, rickshaws and scooters pushing through the crowd, and dozens of touts pulling sleeves to offer tailoring and other unlooked-for services. This may be due to the presence now of a police station at the foot of the road, promoted by a well-signed "Men In Brown" campaign, the idea being that these otherwise paramilitary-looking dudes will not hesitate to supply accurate, even affectionate direction to hapless monolingual tourists. Be that as it may, the trained eye still sees many john-prostitute pairs wandering about, a little sheepish this far from Patpong, surrounded by more innocent offerings.


But hooray! Into all this charges Mr. Thailand pedaling his vainglorious bicycle rickshaw spangled with colorful advertisements, forming a sort of Mardi Gras-style mobile throne for slightly embarassed tourists booming encouraging pop music, e.g. Johnny Cash's "Goin' Down To Jackson, gonna mess around..." The man himself sports sunglasses and flowy robes, a Spock hairdo and a perpetual grin. A Burning Man-style reinterpretation of the city, he is easily my favorite thing in this country so far, beating out petting tigers, giant temples made of colored mirrors, aquatic markets, snorkeling marred by pollution, and the mounds of fresh fruit that are my second favorite thing (come to think of it, Mr. T is a fresh fruit as well...) By plunging into the ubiquitous (to me, exhausting) tourist trade so wantonly, he creates his own peacock tail from the tawdry trappings of faceless capitalism, making his own native statement in a place defined by cultural exploitation. Hooray for Mr. Thailand!