Sukhumvit Street Life

Our first few days in Bangkok were spent re-acquainting ourselves with Sukhumvit life. Previously, I’ve ranted about the grey English winter and the complete lack of light and colour. No shortage of the latter now; the sun bright in the sky, temperatures in the 30s, and, god, the pleasure to feel warmth again. And the thing I’d forgotten was the noise and the smells of the place! The Bangkok traffic is as crazy as ever, motorcycle taxis still drive on the pavements, at least when the street vendors don’t force pedestrian and cyclist together onto the roads. The sound of jackhammers bounces off the high-rises until late at night, and sometimes beyond (Carolyn tells us that these noisy, inefficient, pneumatic drills are wielded by flip flop-attired Burmese immigrants because they are cheap – the drills and the labour – not much H&S over here!). The air is full of the smells of hydrocarbons and barbequed fish. The same woman and child are begging at the same stairway to Phrom Phong skytrain station, except that the child is regressing in time: she should be about 4 years old by now but this one is a six month old baby. Not much of a life to look forward to . . . The same happy hour at the Robin Hood pub and, unlike England, the beers are at the same prices. The only problem is, unbelievably, while the western economies are going down the toilet, the Asians have learned their lessons by not borrowing money like lunatics so that the exchange rate against western currency is a lot worse than last year. My 80 Baht happy hour pint of Tiger beer now costs £1.70: thank you again for everything Gordon! Having said that, happy hour has had a lot to answer for in terms of hangovers but let’s not go into that.

In pursuit of my goal to eat my way across South East Asia, we had lunch at my favourite street restaurant at the top of Soi 39 and Sukhumvit which is best described as an outdoor soup kitchen with a lost of rickety wooden stools and tables. It typifies everything I love about this place; chaotic (all the young men and women come here for lunch during the office dinner hour, all ordering at once), cheap (Linda had a fried rice dish for 80 pence; a large bottle of Singha beer is around £1.90), incredibly tasty (despite the fact that everyone does the cooking and table-waiting in an apparantly random sort of way), and you never know quite what you are going to get. Since nobody speaks English, you have to point at a faded picture in the menu and hope for the best. I ended up with a huge deep fried fish in a long steel bowl with pak choi and carrots and some inedible green stalky vegetable chopped up in a rich hot and spicy sauce that blew the top of my head off. Unbelievably good grub, and far more than I’m used to for lunch, so I had to sleep it off for a couple of hours by the swimming pool. Can life get any better than this? And everyone wonders why I’m a grumpy old git at home!

Gotta go and pack now. We are setting out on our own tomorrow without the protective umbrella of CavTours. Destination: the hippy island of Koh Samet. More to follow if we manage to find our way there . . .