Bangkok: City of Angels, City of Sales Pitches

I visited Bangkok a total of four times as a hub during the Southeast Asia portion of the trip. I am not, in the end, a Bangkok convert. This puts me in a minority among the travellers I met, for whom the city seems to produce something close to devotion: they talk about it the way people talk about cities they have adopted as their own, returning repeatedly, measuring other places against it, planning future visits before the current one is finished. My honest view is that Bangkok is a large, busy, hot city with excellent food, good transport, world-class malls, a significant sex tourism economy that is smaller than Western myth suggests but larger than the tourist board would prefer, and streets that are considerably less exotic than the films and guidebooks prepared me to expect. This is not a criticism. It is a description. The Hangover Part II, which was filmed partly in Bangkok and which I watched on a plane before arriving, is not a documentary.

The city’s full name is worth knowing because it says something about the ambition of the place at the time it was named. The formal name, given when Bangkok became the capital in 1782 under Rama I, founder of the Chakri dynasty that still occupies the throne, translates roughly as City of Angels, Great City of Immortals, Magnificent City of the Nine Gems, Seat of the King, City of Royal Palaces, Home of Gods Incarnate, Erected by Visvakarman at Indra’s Behest. The shortened version used by Thais is Krung Thep, City of Angels, which is how it appears on Thai maps and documents and why foreigners who learn it can seem briefly insufferable about the subject. Bangkok was the name given by Westerners referring to the original fishing village on which the capital was built. It stuck, which is how these things tend to work.

What Bangkok does well: food, in almost every category and at almost every price point; transport, the BTS Skytrain and MRT system between them covering most of the areas a visitor needs to reach, efficiently and cheaply; cinema, the multiplex at Siam Paragon being genuinely one of the better cinema experiences available anywhere, with the royal montage as a bonus piece of cultural education. The floating market at Damnoen Saduak, which several people recommended and which I visited in heavy rain with a group of Irish women I met at the hostel, is not what the photographs suggest. The boats are real, the market is real, but it is now essentially a tourist theatre running on an infrastructure that was built for a different economy and a different relationship between the city and the water. Worth knowing before you make the journey.

The tiger sanctuary outside the city I found more genuinely interesting, partly because the tigers are of course extraordinary animals and partly because the organisation’s model, funding conservation through structured tourist interaction, raises questions that I don’t think have clean answers. The tigers appear healthy and calm. Whether that calm is the product of good care or something else is a question that I am not equipped to resolve and which the volunteers working there also seemed to be holding with appropriate uncertainty.

Bangkok is the kind of city that reveals itself in proportion to the time you spend in it, which is true of most large cities and means that my four visits gave me less of it than I would have needed to genuinely know it. What I know is the mall district and Khao San Road and the canal boats and the best pad thai I have eaten anywhere in Thailand, from a cart in a side street near Silom at eight in the morning. That is not Bangkok. It is the beginning of Bangkok. Perhaps that is enough.