Saturday, August 12, 2006
Bangkok 5am Blues
Well, the bus arrived early. Normally that's a good thing, but not when it means you arrive in a city whose only function today is as a lengthy, and entirely unwanted, layover between bus rides. It's not that I don't like bangkok - although it is loud, noisy, and packed with people whose goal is to help you (at least insofar as that involves you giving them money).
OK, so maybe it is that I don't like Bangkok. Even Chiang Mai seemed big and noisy and smelly after a few days in the small towns. Kho San road, even at 5am is getting there. Hopefully my "NO I don't want a taxi / guesthouse / massage" grimace will become more obvious as the day dawns and thus spare me the need to inflict physical injury on someone.
Yes, I'm a little cranky. I've been on a bus for most of the last 12 hours, during which I was subjected to several of the world's crueller tortures, to wit 1) Being seated behind two chatty girls with annoying voices and uninteresting topics of conversation 2) being seated beneath a hissing and too loud speaker that is busy garbling the soundtrack of some movie I don't want to watch on a screen that I can't quite see 3) a bus driver who thinks he is a racecar driver while driving 4) a bus whose rear suspension seems to be connected to the brake pedal, causing plenty of lurching.
Somehow I managed to get enough sleep that I'm not sleepy right now. Which leaves me with another problem - a 15 kilogram 100 litre backpack. So I'm killing time on the internet, then I'll go eat something (or possibly someONE, a lot of the taxi drivers are very little), then dunno.
The smart play might have been to try and arrange a room for 12 hours and just try to sleep, but I can't be bothered trying to negotiate this, and don't want to sleep right now as I still have to kill time on the trip down to Ko Tao and my book habit is getting expensive and I want to stay on a somewhat normal sleep schedule.
The plan for today is wander round following Lonely planet's Bangkok in a day route, although that does involve a lot of temples and markets which I am kind of ambivalent about right now so maybe inspiration will strike and I'll do something cool. We'll see what happens I guess.
OK, so maybe it is that I don't like Bangkok. Even Chiang Mai seemed big and noisy and smelly after a few days in the small towns. Kho San road, even at 5am is getting there. Hopefully my "NO I don't want a taxi / guesthouse / massage" grimace will become more obvious as the day dawns and thus spare me the need to inflict physical injury on someone.
Yes, I'm a little cranky. I've been on a bus for most of the last 12 hours, during which I was subjected to several of the world's crueller tortures, to wit 1) Being seated behind two chatty girls with annoying voices and uninteresting topics of conversation 2) being seated beneath a hissing and too loud speaker that is busy garbling the soundtrack of some movie I don't want to watch on a screen that I can't quite see 3) a bus driver who thinks he is a racecar driver while driving 4) a bus whose rear suspension seems to be connected to the brake pedal, causing plenty of lurching.
Somehow I managed to get enough sleep that I'm not sleepy right now. Which leaves me with another problem - a 15 kilogram 100 litre backpack. So I'm killing time on the internet, then I'll go eat something (or possibly someONE, a lot of the taxi drivers are very little), then dunno.
The smart play might have been to try and arrange a room for 12 hours and just try to sleep, but I can't be bothered trying to negotiate this, and don't want to sleep right now as I still have to kill time on the trip down to Ko Tao and my book habit is getting expensive and I want to stay on a somewhat normal sleep schedule.
The plan for today is wander round following Lonely planet's Bangkok in a day route, although that does involve a lot of temples and markets which I am kind of ambivalent about right now so maybe inspiration will strike and I'll do something cool. We'll see what happens I guess.
