Walking Bangkok
A wonderfully feverish cluttered city caught between the old and new
This is a walking newsletter so I will start by pointing out that Bangkok is not a pleasant city to walk in, at all. It is oppressively hot and humid, with periodic outbursts of rain so fierce and long that no umbrella, no plastic tarp, no strategy other than sheltering in place can keep you dry.
Unlike in Hanoi and Jakarta, there are very few charming neighborhoods of narrow curving back alleys cooled by the shade of row-homes, sprays of water, and plaza-sized ponds to break the monotony of urban walking. Instead, the alleys (Sois or Troks) are long, straight dreary affairs, with most ending after a half mile at the edge of a rancid canal of raw sewage. The few longer alleys are not kind to pedestrians, instead they are thin drag strips for mopeds, cars, and tuk tuks, which use them as cut throughs from one major road to another.
To walk long distances, like I try and do, requires sticking almost exclusively to the major roads, which if you don’t want to pass out from heat exhaustion, requires constantly pivoting to the side with shade, playing dodge-the-delivery-moped guy while crossing wide intersections, negotiating sidewalks that undulate more than a sidewalk should, and then being content with a cheap cartoon-like backdrop of repeating markets, malls, 7-Elevens, food stalls, office complexes, and metro stops, for mile upon mile upon mile.
It is not that it’s a bad backdrop, it’s that there’s seemingly little to learn from the uniformity, at least at first, when it’s all so ruthlessly hot, all so stimulating, and all you can do to keep yourself from passing out is stop every few blocks in a 7-Eleven to cool down and regain your balance by searching the drink rack for something that doesn’t sound like it was created in a large scale Reese's peanut butter cup style collision: “Hey, you got your soy in my banana! You got your banana in my soy! And you both got your soy and banana in my green tea! And all of you got your soy, banana, and green tea, in my tapioca grass jelly!”
I did come close to passing out, twice, and thankfully both times I managed to find air conditioning before the vertigo put me on my backside. While regaining my composure, I realized the loss of balance was less about the temperature (I’ve walked in many heat waves before) but about there being too much to see.
Bangkok is dense, both physically, visually, and experientially, and that uniform backdrop isn’t what it first seems when you look more carefully: It is overflowing and pulsating, an urban and human cornucopia. A city of plenty, with stores, restaurants, stalls, and food stands in every nook and cranny, each a little different from the other. There’s no space in Bangkok left untouched, no discarded patch of land underneath a tangle of elevated roadways, no plot too harsh and uninviting, that doesn’t have at least four or five vendors pitching something, be it food, motor parts, lottery tickets, keys made on order, outdoor tailors, and haircuts. No placid backdrop your eyes can rest on to give your senses and brain a break.