Bangkok, Thailand
Thailand's roads and infrastructure are highly developed. Driving from the airport to the city feels much like being at home, though the green road signs are in an unintelligible text. The highway into town was elevated above the city below for nearly its entire length and carries cars only, no tuk-tuks, no bicycles. There is gridlock, however, on a Californian scale. Once you exit the freeway this gridlock is even worse. The "half-hour" ride to my hotel took two hours and fifteen minutes. Exhausted from hours and hours of travel, I slept on the back seat for most of the ride.
Bangkok is now a modern city with many office towers and more on the way. The airport is brand new and works well. A new
train station is being built, I could see the red scaffolding above the construction. The city is in the delta of the Chao Phraya River. I learned this from a map, but you can see it immediately when you arrive and travel throughout the city. There is water in ponds, puddles, and canals running all through the city and much of the city is along the waterfront, where longboats and barges ply a surging brown current.
11-1-2008 Royal Hotel
Bangkok, Thailand
I managed to meet up with my father's old friend Professor Ron Knapp and his ph
otographer friend, Chester, yesterday. Ron is a cultural geographer who was my father's first college roommate at Stetson university nearly 50 years ago. Although I talked to Professor Knapp before applying to graduate school to study geography, I had never met him in person. Ron's specialty is the architecture of traditional Chinese houses which he has studied for nearly 40 years in his career at SUNY, New Paltz. So, after contacting him by phone, I took a taxi across town to meet him. I made the classic mistake of getting in a taxi that had no meter and paid the equivalent of $8 for a taxi ride that should have cost me $2. The driver, who spoke a little English, offered to take me to see some nighttime entertainment later in the day. These shows had brazen medically descriptive titles that I can't repeat publicly. I passed on these. He also offered to immediately take me sight-seeing, shopping, or to lunch. Pass, pass, and pass. It seemed that an American man traveling alone in Bangkok was a tempting target and a likely customer for all kinds of profitable consumption. But it was my first day here and I was glad to be out and glad to have found a taxi quickly so I didn't bother to protest him overcharging me. I simply thanked the man for his services. Despite my jokes I should make it clear that, like most cities in the world, the sex industry is clustered in a red light district and is not apparent as you move about town. Just as visitors to Los Angeles who expect to see freeway shootings or violent cri
me will be disappointed, visitors to Thailand who fear brazen vice will be pleasantly surprised to not find it. It's not as if prostitutes roam the streets, that's how we do it at home.
Ron Knapp is a thin, energetic man in his sixties. Dressed in shorts, walking shoes, a polo shirt, and a khaki vest of the sort that is popular with photographers and international journalists, he has about him the pleasantly agitated air that many scholars project when they're doing field work, hunting as they are for some esoteric gem that the more mundane world isn't even likely to notice. He seems to 
take great joy in chasing down a unique old house or a novel Chinese neighborhood. After chatting a bit, we met up with a young Thai finance student, Ploy, and a friend of hers who were assisting Ron in Chinatown. We headed to Chinatown in Ploy's small SUV. At first the streets were relatively empty and I wondered if Saturday morning might be the quietest time in Bangkok. However, by the time we got to Chinatown the gridlock had returned. Ron was planning to revisit a very old Chinese house that has been saved by its Chinese owner who added a four meter deep diving pool and a small kennel, each of which is used commercially. Ron explained that Chinese inheritance traditions tend to divide wealth among all the sons so it is rare to be able to afford to keep large, old properties in the family unless each generation is creative about income.
Chester was hoping to take a few more photographs at the house, but the previous night's rain storm had flooded most of the block with about half a foot of water, including the area immediately around the house. Instead we headed off to a two-hundred year old Chinese temple. Aromatic incense filled the inner courtyard where people were making offerings of bananas and coconuts and lighting candles. The clickity-clack sound of an old woman throwing prayer blocks repeatedly broke the silence as she slowly approached the alter on her kn
ees. Chinatown is actually right along the Chao Phraya River and many of homes along the river were nearly swamped by the churning brown current and the splashing turbulence. The river was obviously very high from recent rainfall and large clumps of green vegetation torn loose upriver rushed past in the muddy brown water. Edifices of all kinds closely line the river which is surrounded by small cement levies that were often failing to keep the water out of the surrounding neighborhoods. Since Bangkok sits at the terminus of the Chao Phraya River and its delta, like New Orleans and Venice and many other waterfront cities, it is prone to flooding. Despite this, a wide variety of edifices closely line the levied banks of the main channel and numerous sie canals: rotting old teak houses, cement warehouses, shiny new municipal buildings, restaurants. And everywhere there is laundry hung out to dry. 
I met the rest of the tourists in my group on Saturday night. They are a typically eclectic group, ranging in age from 18 to about 50 and hailing from various countries, including Portugal, Poland, Canada, Germany, and England. My roommate Les is an affable guy who works in the Gap Adventures office in Toronto and is taking his annual free trip. He's rail thin, 26 years old, well over six feet tall, and always wears a camouflaged cap in the sun because he sunburns easily. Our tour guide Ken is a youngish Thai man who speaks very deliberately. He's all smiles except when he's concentrating and he often makes silly jokes or puns based around language confusion or referencing Hollywood films. These jokes make him laugh too.
On the first morning of the tour we went to the Wat Arun complex to see, among many other Buddhas and stupas, the giant reclining Buddha. It's 46 meters long and over 16 meters in height. The building that houses it seems to stretch to just barely contain the statue. Truly impressive.
