Adventures in Hades

As a backpacker or budget traveler visiting Bangkok, it seems to me that there is one particularly good option available: Going to Soi Rambuttri, a mostly quiet walkway, heavily touristed and pretty hard to get to from the airport, but largely peaceful. In particular the Bella Bella Hostel seems quite civilized and provides wireless, if you're into that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, having never been to this part of town, I landed at Bangkok airport at 1:30 am last night, courtesy of Airasia's budget flights, hopped in a taxi and asked to be taken to Khao Sanh Road (hereafter referred to as Hades), the most notorious backpacker street around. Even at 3 am the place was absolutely jammed with people, pool halls, food sellers, thumping music. A fun time, except that I had nowhere to stay and eventually wandered around for about twenty minutes, settling on 250 baht (8 dollars US) for my lodgings. It was certainly a rip-off because I ended up sleeping in a room with a fan, two beds (why?) and nothing else. The fan kept things just cool enough that I wasn't going out of my mind, but for the rest of the night I slept in no more than fifteen minute increments as the people around me drank, yelled, thumped repeatedly on the door (especially that one time at 6 am), moaned inappropriately and all that, all the while the music kept going and going and going. It was hard not to believe I'd been consigned to a prison sentence.

However, the rest of the town has been rather pleasant. I was here a few weeks ago so I have seen the things that are supposed to be seen and instead am contenting myself with taking life very, very easy. After my escape from Hades I ate a tasty three dollar lunch (sounds cheap until I realize it's actually expensive by China standards, but whatever), strolled around slowly, then stumbled across a used book seller with an eldritch copy of Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. My computer charger appears to have burnt a fuse or something so I have very little in the way of entertainment except for a thin roman by Paulo Coelho and my scrabble dictionary, and there's only so much time I can spend with the latter without feeling too nerdy for words. In any case, the guy had a great selection but the clincher was looking through the weatherbeaten copy of foucault's pendulum and seeing that it was absolutely loaded with notes, sometimes very relevant and scholarly, sometimes snarky, at other times bizarre. Going through the annotations is almost as much of an adventure as reading the book itself. I needed that little episode to recover my feeling that everything in the world pretty much works out and doesn't have to be quite so artificial. if that makes any sense.

Tonight I head for chiang mai, at 5:30 to be precise. The price I received, 400 baht, makes it clear that some sort of scam is in the works. But hell, I am patient, and the alternative seemed to be hanging around Hades for another night, entirely out of the question. Though Bangkok is pretty there's something about this part of town that very much unsettles me. I think I've been in China too long, because the volume of foreigners and their sort of indifference to anything but having fun makes me depressed. I would rather have every third person look at me and exclaim at how tall I am.