Bangkok

On my way back to India I arranged to meet a friend with whom I'd previously travelled in India and Nepal. Jennie was travelling from India to southeast Asia, so we agreed to meet in Bangkok for three days. I love the way this travel magic works.

We'd both been to Bangkok before so we weren't particularly interested in doing the 'usual' tourist things. We were wandering about when we came across a lake that hired out double-headed duck paddle boats. We couldn't resist this bit of silliness so we hired one and paddled about. We were startled to discover that there was a colony of enormous monitor lizards living in and around the lake. We watched them eat whole fish and birds, lick blood off their faces and generally just look rather threatening. The video shows the slow swagger of these massive creatures.
We then tried to return our double-headed duck boat to the jetty, where the woman in charge helpfully took our picture. But after much babbling in mutually unintelligible languages, wild gesticulating and pointing frantically to the jetty (us) and the other side of the lake (her), we realised that the woman from whom we'd hired the boat had been very pregnant, and this one wasn't. We'd tried to return the boat to another company, in another place. Ah - all double-headed duck boat hire places look alike to me!

Our next stop was the Bangkok Snake Farm, where we saw many snakes (no surprise there) both alive and dead. Not for the faint-hearted.

We visited Jim Thompson House, which is an amazing complex of ancient Thai buildings collected together in one place by an American silk trader in the 1960s. The photos don't do it justice - this is a truly beautiful home. If I am ever a gazillionaire, I'd like to create a home like this. It was perfect: light, space, greenery, ancient sculptures, clean wooden lines, fascinating objects from all over Thailand.

In the evening, we did the obligatory tourist thing of drinking on Khao San Road. Jennie and I were immediately attracted to a bar with a huge sign saying 'we do not check IDs', with every waiter wearing a T-shirt with that message. This was funny because (a) NO bars on Khao San Road check IDs, and (b) Jennie and I are both well above the drinking age. In fact, two-thirds of my daughters are above the drinking age! We were sitting there drinking VERY STRONG cocktails, as the sign informed us, when Jennie was hailed by an Australian man - it turned out that she'd met him in Malaysia a few weeks earlier, and here they both were on Khao San Road in Thailand at the same time. I love the way this travel magic works!

We chatted a bit, well a lot, and something made me think that I ought to know who this chap was - he claimed to have 'worked in Australian politics' but was otherwise vague about his background. A few days later, when I had his full name, I Googled him - well, what else do you do? It turns out he was a disgraced former Queensland politician who had been facing charges there over sexual harassment and workplace harassment. He had lost his seat even though the voters had swung towards his party everywhere else in the state. And the best part? We knew he had been living in Malaysia since September, and were rather tickled to discover a newspaper article asking where he had been since September, when he had apparently 'fled the country'. Part of me felt like contacting Crikey to reveal his whereabouts, but in the end, Jennie and I just decided to have another cocktail ......


So what else do you do in Bangkok after you've paddled in a double-headed duck boat, visited a snake farm and caught up with an Australian former politician on the run? Of course, you go to the zoo to see a Kenyan Boys Acrobatic Team. And that we did.

The Kenyan Boys were entertaining, to say the least: semi-naked, covered in oil and pelvic thrusting the whole way through the show. Some day I'll show you the videos, but this is a family blog, so let me just leave you with a photo of me with one of the Boys. Look at that six-pack.


The rest of the zoo was almost as entertaining. Jennie somehow managed to get shat upon by a penguin with a bad case of diarrhoea, through a gap in a glass enclosure. The photo shows the aggrieved Jennie, the offending penguin and the dirty window!


Finally, we were rather confused about all the pictures of pandas, panda signs and jolly little panda souvenirs that were on sale. There are NO pandas at Bangkok Zoo folks, don't be fooled. Well, except for the ATM, which was shaped like a panda. Since this was the closest I was going to get to a panda in Bangkok, I took a photo of the ATM. And here it is.