Ziplining in Chon Buri, A Farewell to Bangkok

At the Chatuchak Weekend ("J.J.") Market in Bangkok.

The morning after my return to Bangkok, I hooked up with a group of three strapping young Swedes (Anna, Chris, and Johan ;) who were on their way to the legendary Chatuchak Market. The Market sprawls over 35 acres of land and sees approximately 200,000 visitors every weekend. There are thousands of stalls (up to 15,000 depending on what you consider a "stall") selling a bewildering variety of wares- I saw live squirrels, crocodile heads (see above picture), bowls of plastic fruit and flowers, jelly toys in grotesque shapes, a pool of piranhas, a seven-foot-tall scrap-metal sculpture of a Predator, hundreds of puppies, and a tattoo parlor, just to recall a few.
The stalls are crammed into dense rows with narrow alleys, sorted into rough groups by the nature of what they sell (refreshments, clothing, decorations, etc). The whole chaotic mess is roofed over with sheets of corrugated tin. The claustrophobic alleyways, packed with sweaty tourists and locals of all stripes, bake as the tropical sun beats down on the low tin roof. In the afternoon, the temperature climbs easily into the 35-40 degree range, and the drink-sellers start doing very good business. The alleys curve, windowless and doorless, for hundreds of meters, and without a detailed map it is all too easy to get lost.
In the morning, however, the sun was only just starting to roast the market, and we spent several pleasant hours roaming the stalls. The animal section was heartbreaking.

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And then the time came for some Major Oral Surgery.

I left my friends at the market, took the train back to the dental clinic in Thong Lo, and within ten minutes of my arrival I was reclining on the dentist's chair in a freshly sterilized surgical room.
The most painful part of the procedure was the injection of anesthetic deep into my hard palate, directly behind the broken incisor. The doctor was calm and gentle, however, and within a few minutes most of my face was completely numb. A surgical shroud was placed over my face, blocking my vision.
"I will now extract the tooth. Let me know if you have any pain," said the doctor.
There was a great deal of leveraging and yanking and tightening of grips and application of pressure with unseen implements, but I was unable to visualize what exactly the doctor was doing. After several minutes, he succeeded in extracting the tooth (which, it turns out, had broken into two separate pieces).
"I will now perform the implant procedure. This should be very quick."
There was the threatening sound of a drill, which was then accompanied by a series of intense vibrations that echoed throughout the bones of my skull. Then silence. I was given a cotton swab to hold against the raw and bleeding hole in my jaw.
"There! That wasn't so bad!" the doctor laughed. "Now you will wait for the other doctor. He will give you the temporary crown."
I waited for ten minutes in the lobby, during which time I drooled blood on my bag because I was too numb to know when to swallow. Then I was called downstairs, and the same doctor who took the mold of my mouth earlier proceeded to shape my temporary crown. He would do this by jamming it into the socket, seeing how it fit with the surrounding teeth, removing it, sanding it down, jamming it back in there, removing it, (etc). Around this time, the anesthetic began to wear off, and each time he slipped the crown into the socket I could taste blood.
By the time the shaping was done and the crown cemented in place, I was in a good deal of pain, which was helped that evening by generous amounts of clinical-strength ibuprofen and beer (Swedish drinking games are insane. I hope to never again be forced to drink beer while hopping in a circle on one leg).
As I was leaving the lobby, a man I had talked to earlier (Australian, also at the clinic for implant surgery) asked me how it went. "Pretty well," I answered, and smiled to show him the work the dentists had done. Something about my bloody, swollen smile seemed to unsettle him- he turned two shades paler, and managed to say "Oh... very good."
"Oh, am I still bleeding?"
"Yes. A little bit."

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On Sunday, Daniel and I traveled up the Chao Phraya River to see the Grand Palace.

Wat Arun, "The Temple of Dawn," taken from a moving waterbus on the Chao Phraya River.
We returned here at the end of the day. Daniel's mother is a passionate collector of snow-globes, and Daniel had been searching all day for a snow-globe to send to her as a souvenir from Bangkok. It was at one of the souvenir shops here, as the sun was setting, that he finally found one.

If you want to get far within the grounds of the Grand Palace, you've got to dress properly. Daniel (who was wearing shorts that day) was forced to wait in a long line of indecently attired and frustrated tourists, to pay a small deposit for a pair of rental slacks.


The most sacred site in Bangkok: The Temple of the Emerald Buddha (Wat Phra Kaeo). It is one of the buildings within the Grand Palace and is the King's personal temple. Inside is housed the sacred Emerald Buddha. The Buddha sits at the top of a towering throne, surrounded by tall golden statues of Buddhist divinity. The Buddha, at only 45cm in height, is somewhat dwarfed by its audacious surroundings. The Buddha itself is roughly 2,000 years old, made of jade, and clothed in gold. The Buddha has three outfits, hand-tailored of pure gold, and these are changed depending on the season (hot, rainy, or cool) by the King himself.

The other buildings are similarly resplendent. There is an achingly beautiful and minutely detailed mural running for hundreds of meters along the interior walls, depicting the entirety of the Ramakien- the national mythological epic of Thailand. None of my photographs turned out well enough to do it justice, so you'll just have to see it yourself...


Precarious construction on the Chao Phraya.

Towards evening we returned to the BTS station via water taxi, and I spent that night at the hostel, drinking heavily with a mirthful group of my fellow travelers.

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And then, Monday: my last full day in Thailand and Daniel's 22nd birthday. Daniel had made reservations in advance for a zipline tour of the rainforests of Chonburi (90 minutes east of Bangkok) called "Flight of the Gibbon." Our scheduled pickup time was 6:30am, at a hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 1.
I woke up that day, saw sunlight streaming through the window, checked my watch, and panicked. It was past 8 am. I had forgotten to set an alarm.
I grabbed my laptop and ran downstairs, cursing and pacing and going through the histrionics I usually go through when I've really screwed something up. Then I half-remembered something about a second pickup time. I ripped open my computer, pulled up the website for the zipline tour, and found it: 8:30am. I checked my watch: 8:07.
Alvi (the manager) was watching me with open amusement.
"How long does it take to get to Sukhumvit Soi 1?!" I shouted.
"About half an hour if you catch a cab from Nana Station," replied Alvi, with a slight chuckle.
Alright! Things weren't hopeless. I looked up the number for the tour company, called it through Skype, and shouted into the tiny laptop microphone that I was on my way and would be no more than a few minutes late to the second pickup. I had no idea where Daniel was. Was he still waiting for me? Did he get picked up at 6:30? I didn't have time to think. I grabbed my bag, stuffed my computer in it, and ran to the train station. At Nana, I hailed the first taxi I could find, then suffered through a very tense, very slow fifteen minutes as the cab crept through heavy morning traffic. At 8:40 the taxi finally pulled up at the hotel. I overpaid the driver, leapt out of the car, and found Daniel busy cutting out pictures of himself to stick to postcards for his friends.
If I had checked my mail that day, I would have found that Daniel had emailed me the night before to say that he had changed our reservation to the 8:30am pickup time. Not only that, but the pickup didn't even happen until after 9:15 because we were stuck waiting for two other people.


Our zipline instructor, right, and the British family we were grouped with.


After being fitted for our gear, we were lead up a long, forested hike to the first of 26 platforms along the 3km course.


Part of the sprawling system of platforms and stairs and cables through the jungle canopy.

Directly to the right of the first landing platform was this terrifying hornet's nest. Each one of the pale spots is a hornet almost the size of your thumb. We were warned to keep our voices down, lest we upset them.

Our guides, apparently bored with the routine of safely shuttling group after group of tourists through the jungle, started teaching us tricks to perform while on the line. This was one of Daniel's better attempts to match them. One of the British guys wasn't so skillful, however- he burned his leg rather badly on the cable.

About halfway through the course, we found one platform undergoing repair by a burly, hammer-wielding Australian with a deeply tanned face and a big laugh.
As soon as we were out of earshot, the group leader whispered "That's the boss man. No tricks! Be safe!" Everyone was very well behaved until he was out of sight, at which point the acrobatics resumed.

We were given a tour of the nearby zoo as part of a package deal (seed pods to feed the giraffes were extra).

I have never gotten this close to something so much larger and stronger than I am. The thickness of its skin was incredible.

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And then came the night... the night of Daniel's birthday.

Oh, most wicked and debauched night, how shall I tell of thee?

I met Daniel near Phloen Chit station, with a small man I had never seen before. The man looked to be in his mid-thirties, and had Asian features. As it turned out, this was the only other person staying at Daniel's hostel, and Daniel had practically dragged him along. I believe he said he was in Thailand from Hawaii on business. Anyway, he was an awkward fellow and it was plain to see that he wasn't in a party mood. After Daniel produced a bottle of whiskey from his jacket the night got more and more twisted and eventually he vanished like a puff of smoke.

Anyway, we (Daniel and I) were so blitzed by the second hour (alcohol was not the only factor) that most of my recollections of the evening are extremely hazy. We were unmistakably in the middle of the worst kind of red-light district. Surrounding us on all sides was a cornucopia of sensory noise: flashing signs, proffered objects, the smell of vomit and asphalt, green lasers from second floor windows, doors to strip clubs, knives for sale. Strip clubs in Bangkok are infamous, for reasons I experienced first hand that night but refuse to relate in public.

We had dinner at around 1 am at a restaurant. I had been trying for an hour (without success) to steer us into a club- I wanted to do some dancing, hopefully with some attractive and lonely girls. I was looking for an open table when Daniel abruptly sat us down with a girl of roughly our same age. She was unmistakably Thai, but her hair was dyed a sort of auburn and her wide eyes were (likely due to cosmetic contacts) grey as granite. Daniel said something charming before sitting down, but it was clear from her look of puzzlement that she didn't understand English well. Then Daniel did something only a true gentleman, shrewd wingman, and fine friend would do: he smiled, indicated me with a sweep of his arm, and said "Haaaave you met Jack?" Then he promptly excused himself and went to the washroom. The girl and I finished our food, all the while attempting to make conversation (she had enough English to say some simple things- body language made up for the rest). She was really quite attractive.

The three of us left the restaurant together, at which point Daniel clapped me on the back, waved farewell, and left me alone with this girl to whom I could not speak and whose name I never asked. What normally would have been a hideously awkward situation was made infinitely more agreeable through the influence of drugs, and we wandered contentedly through the streets of Bangkok (our talk was never quite coherent enough for us to work out a plan). Then, somehow, we found ourselves enveloped in each-others' arms under a streetlight. After that things only got worse from a moral standpoint, and I returned to the hostel in the morning happy but utterly divested of my innocence (sorry mom).

I haven't seen Daniel since. He's in Europe now, in the process of conquering the planet.

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Tuesday evening, I began my journey back home to Japan.

Graffiti on a room divider in one of Manila International's waiting rooms. I had a 14-hour layover there, which gave me time to poke around. Actually, owing to the length of my stay, I was given access to the relatively luxurious "Mabuhay Lounge" and all its amenities (including full-size leather couches, free coffee, and complimentary hors d'oeuvres). It was quite nice.

A few videos I took while ziplining- hopefully they loaded correctly ^ ^;
The top one is a first-person take, and the second shows Daniel coming in for a smooth landing:



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Alas! I have been in a state of abject indolence for the last two weeks, owing to the long holiday, but I'm loving it.

m (. _. ) m

Will post some more adventures soon... Best wishes to all from Japan.