Round The World and other travels
A frequent flyer's collection of trip diaries
This is: Chilling Out on Phu Quoc (2018)
One night in Bangkok
I arrived at the VIE Hotel, an MGallery by
Sofitel, around 1845 local time. Bruce was seated in the lobby and
spotted me immediately. He had left home in Bristol very early on
Thursday morning to travel first on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to
Amsterdam, then on Garuda Indonesia to Jakarta and onwards to
Bangkok. He had already spent one of his two nights in the Thai
capital. In contrast, I had left home in Edinburgh on Thursday
afternoon, but only to go as far as Bristol, where I spent the night
in Bruce's otherwise empty flat! My own intercontinental journey
began the following afternoon with relocation to London Heathrow,
and continued with an overnight Thai
Airways flight to Bangkok. Now, on Saturday
evening, the team was together once again.
| After I had briefly settled into the impressive one-bedroom suite that Bruce was already occupying, we headed out along the Phayathai Road and Rama I Road to the nearby Siam Paragon mall, part of the larger Siam Square shopping development. As we walked along, I thought about the changes that had taken place, compared to my earliest memories of the city in 1986: | |
| - | the presence of Skytrain, the elevated railway with obtrusive concrete infrastructure that has transformed local |
| transport for visitors and locals alike; | |
| - | the sleek, modern vehicles on the road, with much less obvious air pollution; |
| - | far fewer tuk-tuks, with most surviving examples being either electric or having quiet, modern engines. |
And of course there was one aspect where nothing had changed: in spite of it all, the entire route was choked with heavily congested traffic!
When
we made it to the mall, I was intrigued to see what the food court
would be like. As it turned out, the concept was thoroughly familiar
from Singapore and elsewhere in this continent, and featured the
same marked contrast with western equivalents. In Europe and North
America, mall food generally has a downmarket feel. In SE Asia (and
Japan), it is excellent. In this instance, the payment method was
surprisingly clunky: you had to load cash onto an electronic card
supplied by the mall, use this to pay and then refund any unused
amount. I daresay contactless credit and debit cards will catch on in
due course, but it did seem a little surprising that they hadn't
done so already.
After wandering back to the hotel along roads that were now considerably quieter, we were conscious of our early start the next morning and decided not to make a late night of it. There would be plenty of opportunities over the next few days to catch up on each other's news.
