Bangkok – Again

Playing with my new camera on Soi Rambutri, Bangkok.

In a couple of months back in the land of Aus I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, attended four weddings (some of them of complete strangers, I just like free champagne), built a shed, bought a camera, broken a puppy’s toe, done no writing whatsoever, and – most importantly – finally beaten Dad at table tennis. It was mid January 2012, time to get back to the trip.

It was good to catch up with the clan and to meet Amy.

          The new plan – if my vague ideas can be called plans – was to try to cross the Thai-Burma border on the Andaman coast, travel up to Rangoon, north through Burma to the Chinese border, then through Southern China to Shanghai where Alicia had landed a teaching job. How hard could it be? Except everyone said that the Burmese border was closed to foreigners, so was the Chinese border. Hmm, only one way to find out.

            I woke on my second day in Bangkok with a nightmare about being tied in a burlap sack and beaten with bamboo by Burmese border guards still lingering in my brain and set off for a spot of visa shopping. First stop was the Chinese embassy – hardly a byword for friendliness and convenience.

            For anyone wanting to get a Chinese tourist visa in Bangkok, here’s a brief outline of how not to do it. First, don’t spend an hour at the riverboat terminal waiting for a boat that never comes, then you shouldn’t give up and sit in the mid-morning traffic for 45 minutes listening to your taxi driver swear in Thai. Whatever you do, don’t get to the embassy an hour after it opens, spend 20 minutes filling out unbelievably complicated forms and attaching two passport photos and a photocopy of your passport. Then under no circumstances should you take a number and wait THREE HOURS for it to be called only to be told by the turkey behind the Perspex that you can’t get a visa unless you have proof of flights in and out of China and proof of hotel bookings for EVERY NIGHT you are in China. That’s what you shouldn’t do.

            What you should do is find a travel agent on Khao San Road who, for an extra 20 bucks will simply take your passport for three days, forge all the required documents and give you a passport complete with 30-day visa for you while you sit sulking in a bar plotting petty revenge like braking an arm off a terracotta warrior or spray painting a giant cock on the Great Wall. Who says you have to be mature just because you’ve turned 30?

Drinking whiskey buckets on Khao San Rd with some Saigon friends.

             Have you guys ever seen that Bourne Supremacy thing? I know – pretty rubbish film. But there is one scene that made me a bit spongy in the trousers. No, it’s not that French chicks boobs, it’s the scene where Matt Damon opens a Swiss deposit box and finds a little compartment full of passports, credit cards, licenses, loads of cash in different currencies and a gun. Well, now I’ve bloody got one. Ok, so there’s no gun – although there is an unusually sharp-edged library card that could give you a nasty graze – but my big old leather wallet does contain two passports (Aussie and Pommy), three bank cards, two drivers licenses and about a thousand bucks in US dollars and Thai Baht. It also has a laminated four leaf clover which – on reflection – I think I may have stolen, which would explain all the bad luck and Irish people punching me in the face.

            All this is a long-winded, silly way of saying that the upside to the awful shame of having an English-born father is that I have two passports. So the next day I woke up early and trekked to the riverboat station, paid thirty cents to get to central pier and hiked to the Myanmar (Burma to you and I) consulate.

            The visa section of the consulate is a barely signposted building down a side street behind a shopping mall. It wasn’t hard to spot though because at 8.30am (half an hour before it opened) there was a line of 50 travellers sitting on the footpath chatting and reading. With a mixture of sensibly-shoed German backpackers and aging Americans of the floppy-pants, tie-dyed bandana variety it looked like someone had double-booked the Grateful Dead fan club and a Gore-Tex expo at the same venue. By the time the doors opened at 9am the line stretched 100m up the street. I braced myself for another long day but I was in and out in 45 minutes. The only awkward moment came when I had to ‘fess up to the whole double passport thing. I explained to him that my Aussie one with the Thai stamp was at the Chinese embassy and that the reason I had a beard in my UK passport photo had less to do with international espionage and more to do with a beard race I had been involved in at the time. After deciding I was too simple to be a spy he handed me a receipt and told me to stop talking and go away. Two days later I returned to get my newly visa-ed passport.

            For the record, I won the beard race in both length and coverage.

            Paperwork sorted, Alicia and I decided to GTFO of Bangkok to the island of Koh Samed. We spent three days swimming in the warm blue water, eating good food and buzzing through the national park on scooters – just your standard Thai island stuff. It was so pleasant it’s not even worth writing about.

Island life.

            Alicia had a flight to catch to start her new teaching gig in Shanghai. I planned to stay on for one more day before making my way to the Burmese border. As her boat chugged away I could see her, squashed between some fat Russians, crying. On her way to a strange, faraway town to start a new job while I pissed around Burma and China for six weeks. I stood waving and smiling – I can’t remember ever feeling like such a massive prick. After a while I must have got some shit in my eyes. That afternoon I rented the fastest dirt bike I could find and tore around the rutted tracks and sandy roads. Helmetless I jumped, slid and wheelied though the jungle at stupid speeds. Then I booked a boat out.

Pretty Koh Samet.