One night in Bangkok

Bangkok doesn’t sleep. It sweats, it hazzles, it seduces. It’s a neon fever dream that hits you like a tuk-tuk running red lights at 3 am. A city with no filters, no cares and certainly no apologies.

I arrived early in the morning to the train station at Hua Lamphong, carrying a large backpack and a bad headache. The city greeted me like an old hustler friend: loud, warm, maybe a little dangerous, but somehow comforting in its madness.

Khao San Road is one of the most infamous streets in Asia. I walked slowly through a gauntlet of persistent street vendors, offering a wide range of questionable consequences. My eyes were clouded by the smoke coming from mystery meat offered by questionable street vendors, while I tried to dodge the crazy tuk-tuk drivers seemingly coming from nowhere.

A single kilometer of concrete road may not sound much, but this particular road is known as the epicenter of the backpacking world. Cheap hostels, internet cafes, suspicious restaurants and everything else available everywhere I looked. Food stalls with banana pancakes share space with a dodgy fellow selling bootlegs and shurikens, embraced by the scent of sizzling satay hanging thick in the air.

And this is just the main road. Even more dodgy parlors can be found in the nearby alleys, drawing the young crowd with a few Baht in their pockets. It’s said that the area irrevocably changed after the movie release of The Beach a few years ago, but it still feels shady enough for me.

“When you hit Bangkok, the Khao San Road is the first place you come. It’s a decompression chamber between East and West.”
— Alex Garland, The Beach (1996)

The chaos at Khao San Road.

In Bangkok, you don’t explore, you simply surrender to the chaos. It didn’t take long before I needed to get away from it all, so I resigned and hailed one of the tuk-tuks. The traffic of Bangkok is so insane that there is no point in being afraid, just go with the flow and hope that everything will be alright. But the odds of surviving feels slightly better being inside the vehicle, so it could be worth a few Baht.

Soon the fumes and blue smoke exhausts got the better part of my lungs, so I managed to escape the infernal vehicle and walked rest of the way down to the Chao Phraya river. For the mere price of 15 bahts I boarded a scruffy boat and left the pier in silence, crossing the murky waters.

The everyday life of this bustling city seems more peaceful from the river. One one side I saw children playing by a pier and on the other side are the beautiful spires of Wat Arun.

Going down the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok.

Renewed with energy I left the floating thing and made my way into the crazy streets once again. As the day quickly turned to dusk, the neon signs blink like sirens and everyone’s selling something. Maybe food. Maybe fantasy. Maybe something that doesn’t translate. Regardless of their wares, all are eager to sell their junk to a tall Scandinavian just passing by.

I remembered what the little girl Newt said about the monsters in the movie Aliens: “They mostly come at night… mostly”.