Thailand Day 2 - The Real Bourbon Street

I’ve been trying to think about what I really like to see when traveling. I think the number one thing is anything unusual or unique, the old Viet-Cong tunnels in Vietnam, the pandas in Chung Du, or the Siberian tigers in Harbin. After that though I like old things, old palaces, old temples, old cities. That’s not to say any old building is interesting, seen one cathedral seen them all, but I like a lot of that sort of stuff. There are plenty of traditional tourist things I don’t like as well. I find nature pretty uninteresting, I like very few museums, and I can’t stand that jumping out of or off of something adventure tourism. But when Ken suggested that we should visit Angkor Wat in Cambodia I was excited, Angkor Wat is a gigantic in ancient temple ruin not far from that Cambodian-Thai border. Since we had read that there are a lot of scams and delays at the border we decided to go and get our visas from the Cambodian embassy in Bangkok. We hailed a taxi and made it all the way across town to the embassy before we’ve realized that we had not remember to bring up passports with us.

Luckily for us the taxis in Bangkok or cheap even by Chinese standards. The Airport which is close to 30km from the city cost only about 300 baht or about nine U. S. dollars. So it only cost us two or $3.00 to get to the embassy. We took another taxi all the way back, picked up our passports, and headed back to the embassy. This time though as we got close our taxi got a flat tire and we had to pull over. The driver was really nice about it though and didn’t charge us for the ride. We finally got there and went into get our visas. Ken had read somewhere that the price was much better in U.S. dollars than in baht and he was certainly right. The visas were 1200 baht, 36 U. S. dollars, or only $25.00 if you had dollars. On top of all that the visas were supposed to cost $20.00 but the guy at the counter mumbled something about expedited service. The thing is that the guidebook suggested that all the extra fees are just scams and sure enough when we got our visas back they said $20.00 on them. I suppose it could have been a real extra fee but also is quite possible we got ripped off at the Cambodian embassy.

After we finally got our visas as we joined Peter to go take a tour of this fancy house which was built by an American in silk exporter who moved to Thailand as part of the USS, the precursor to the CIA, during WWII. He made enough money that he was able to build his dream house using several hundreds of your old houses he bought from various villages and move to Bangkok. The house was very nice, each village house made up one room, and he had some interesting art and plants. To get their we took a very nice elevated train which ran to a bunch of places around Bangkok. The house though was a little bit away from the station so we got a tuk-tuk to take us the rest of the way. A tuk-tuk is basically a motorcycle with three wheels and a little seat on the back. I remember them as a really cheap way to get around the city from my last trip to Bangkok, but there’s been a big change mainly last time I was in Bangkok I has a Thai person with me to do the negotiating. This means that the price of the tuk-tuks went up exponentially and we ended up paying almost as much to go five blocks to the house as we did to go across the city to the Cambodian embassy.

Later we met up with Sean and Sarah who had just gotten off their plane. After dinner we decided to check out one of Bangkok’s famous red light districts. As I commented on earlier the prostitution certainly isn’t confined to any one area, but a few places are just all prostitution. Though not the oldest the place which is maybe the biggest is a street called Soi Cowboy. Soi Cowboy looks sort of like Bourbon Street in New Orleans with intense neon everywhere, but while Bourbon Street is pretty much for college kids and tourists with cameras Soi Cowboy is the real deal. Every building on the street is a bar, and every bar is just a really thinly disguised front for prostitution. The only thing on the streets besides these “bars” are a few food vendors and a couple of kids pedaling flowers. We walk down the street taking in the intense neon glow until we came to something that really stopped us, a bar with football on. It was the second week of the playoffs but I couldn’t think how long it had been since I’d seen a football game. I like baseball more than a football, but I really missed watching football on TV. We bought some beers and sat down to watch for while. Ken and Peter want to check out what was going on inside but I was more into watching the game. Not long after they went inside were met a couple of guys who are on leave from a military posting in Okinawa. Like us they were pretty much just taking and the extreme neon-sex glow of the area. Ken and Peter came back out saying that inside it was even more direct than outside. This being Bangkok the more surprising thing was that the Jets beat the Chargers.

P.S.
This one was supposed to have some pictures but I can't get the internet to cooperate.