Wait, I got a little ahead of myself – I forgot Bangkok! Let’s put India on hold for a moment and pop back over to Thailand.

BANGKOK, THAILAND
I hate Bangkok. I’ve always hated Bangkok. I’ve never been in Bangkok and thought, “I don’t hate this place.” But you know what I realized this time?

It’s not Bangkok’s fault. Bangkok is an astoundingly dynamic city that oozes awesome from every fetid gutter, glittering skyscraper and dude selling meat on a stick. It’s crazier than New York, friendlier than Tokyo and throws parties DC can’t even imagine.

But I’ve never stayed here long enough to get that. I’ve been in and out of Bangkok eight times and it’s never more than a layover – my Bangkok is a city of limbo, a steamy purgatory, a place to think about what you just left and what the hell is going to happen next.

Maybe one day I’ll figure this place out. Today is not that day.

BANGKOK -> CHIANG MAI, THAILAND
Most people told me that the train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai was kind of a ripoff. It costs twice as much as the bus, takes twice as long and something always, always goes awry. I’ve never listened to a good word in my life and I was sick of buses anyway, so I bought a ticket for the hard sleeper and hopped on at two in the afternoon.

The train isn’t exactly luxurious, but being able to stand up and hang out of the last car whenever you please is luxury enough. There are no compartments in hard sleeper class, but around eight pm the conductor comes by and converts all the seats to beds. They’re actually really confortable, and when it’s time to crash the rocking of the car and Thailand’s lax perscription laws will put anyone right to sleep.

Sure enough, something went wrong. A few hours out there was an accident up the tracks (a train with sixteen cars full of concrete completely derailed; nobody was hurt, but we passed it later and was as awesome as it sounds) and we had to go back to the nearest town. We were told we could refund our tickets and buy seats on the next night bus. I stuck around for a bit, hearing the train’s re-departure time change from “tomorrow” to “five hours” to “very soon,” and when the beast finally set off again we’d only lost three or four hours. As some sort of cosmic compensation for the ordeal the sleeper car had nearly emptied out, leaving only myself, a French woman, her Indonesian companion and a Thai music student.

He carried a violin and a guitar; we jammed like there was nothing else to do.

BANGKOK, THAILAND
It’s both amazing and completely unsurprising that a place like Tewet market could exist in Bangkok. Somebody forgot the middle ground – the sparkling glass and concrete of MBK have somehow failed to render Tewet’s old tarps and dirty canvas sheets obsolete. No matter how many Dairy Queens and 7-11s they build the market’s dissected animals, suffering sea life and unidentifiable pastes keep commerce in a dingy maze of fetid puddles and jerry-rigged shopfronts.

Tourism literature calls this “vibrance.”

If MBK is the way the city wants to be seen, then Tewet market is like running into Bangkok drunk out of her mind on a weeknight (I’m not sure where sex tourism fits into this analogy). Thailand may be close to a giant theme park for Westerners already, but as long as people are willing to buy live catfish out of half an oil barrel its soul will show through.

BANGKOK, THAILAND
Generically extravagant shopping centers have been a fixture of the Asian megacity for decades, metastisizing upwards from corrugated steel rooftops and tangled black powerlines to spawn smaller consumer-tumors in the streets around them. Forget about the HDI – in Asia, the best development index is how big of a mall you can build.

Japan, for example, is essentially one contiguous retail complex. Underneath downtown Osaka are mile-long subway stations filled with fancy clothing stores, restaurants and electronic outlets, and in Tokyo you don’t even have to be downtown to find that.

Vietnam, on the other hand, has only a few absurd shopping centers that are all concentrated in downtown Saigon. Diamond Plaza is Vietnam’s attempt at The Asian Mall, a big glass tower that also sports office space and serviced apartments for rich white people. The arcade on top is what makes it a real winner – Saigon is a stressful place, and every once in a while bowling a game or two and shooting a hundred zombies is exactly what you need to chill yourself out. I’m only really mentioning it because I just found the website, which is hilarious in just about every way a department store website can be (I love the music).

Bangkok’s Asian Mall (well, the biggest) is MBK, an eight floor monstrosity in the middle of the closest thing the city has to a downtown. A lot of it actually maintains the chaotic feel of an Asian market, minus that smell, but it’s still serviced by a swanky elevated rail system and connected to Siam Square (“The Shinjuku of Bangkok” is a little bit of an exaggeration) by an air-conditioned bridge. MBK’s the place to go if you need a cheap cell phone or tacky piece of furniture, but it’s really not any different from a mall you’d find in the US.

MBK’s shiny exterior is definitely a face Bangkok puts on for the world before it tries to convince us that it’s not just a huge mess, but I’d hesitate to say that it’s not the “real” Bangkok. Bangkok is about excess and flamboyance, something you see everywhere from the street food to Khaosan Road (“A short road that has the longest dream in the world”) to Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong, the city’s infamous sex districts. Those older tourists that refuse to leave downtown may never experience all the tainted glory that Bangkok has to offer, but they’re certainly not missing the point. MBK is nothing if not excessive.

BANGKOK, THAILAND
On the morning of my first full day in Bangkok I came out of the shower and saw this pasted on the wall, printed in Times New Roman on a waterlogged piece of letter paper.

Oh, what the hell. I got on the Chao Phraya river taxi and took it north as far as it would go, out of Bangkok proper and into the suburbs. The area around the Nonthaburi station looks exactly like the outskirts of any Asian city, squat and full of street food, but as soon as you round a corner it turns into a lifeless stretch of four-lane road lined by guard towers.

But wait, a few words about Bang Kwang.

There are probably worse prisons in the world, but Bang Kwang Central is one of the most notorious. The Thai government locks up a lot of foreigners, and they go home with stories. It’s almost always drug trafficking – most of Southeast Asia is absurdly harsh about drugs being taken across borders (though less so about actual usage, it seems) and while you’re unlikely to be set up or taken in for no reason at all once you’ve been caught with a kilo of heroin the police can make up anything they want. No foreigners have been executed in Thailand in over a hundred years (according to the internet, anyway) but it’s pretty common to receive a death sentence and have it commuted to life.

It sounds totally absurd that anyone would ever even think about smuggling drugs over here, but Thailand is the sort of place that makes the less level-headed feel invincible. There’s another post to be written there.

Since foreign prisoners usually do get released, or at least sent to their own country’s prison system (Americans usually get sent home, which is, um, a big improvement), there’s been a lot written on Bang Kwang. The best I’ve read is Warren Fellows’ The Damage Done, the story of his twelve years for heroin. At one point he’s thrown in solitary with there’s no light and nothing to eat but rice, so only way to survive is to reach down beneath the floorboards and scarf cockroaches for protein.

So, what did I do? I walked down that desolate road and took a few pictures, though I put the camera away pretty quickly because I thought it might not be the best idea to tote around a huge SLR outside a maximum security prison. I asked a guard at the gate and found the visitor’s window, where a surly man in an ill-fitting uniform and your grandpa’s glasses wrote something on a piece of paper.

“ONLY TUESDAY TURSDAY”

“It is Thursday.” I said.

“No. Today Friday. You go.” I checked my phone. It was indeed Friday. Somehow, in the fifteen timezones and six borders I’ve crossed in the past month, I’d lost an entire day. I still don’t know where it went.

Hell if I was sticking around in Bangkok another five days. Sorry, Antony.

“WHEN THE AMERICAN TROOPS left Vietnam and all the Rest and Recreation programs ended it was thought that Bangkok would collapse. Bangkok, a hugely preposterous city of temples and brothels, required visitors. The heat, the traffic, the noise, the cost in this flattened anthill make it intolerable to live in; but Bangkok, whose discomfort seems a calculated discouragement to residents, is a city for transients. Bangkok has managed to maintain its massage parlor economy without the soldiers, by advertising itself as a place where even the most diffident foreigner can get laid. So it prospers. After the early morning Floating Market Tour and the afternoon Temple Tour, comes the evening Casanova Tour. Patient couples, many of them very elderly, wearing yellow badges saying Orient Escapade, are herded off to sex shows, blue movies or “live shows” to put them in the mood for a visit later the same evening – if they’re game – to a whorehouse or a massage parlor. As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of death and money.

Bangkok has an aspect of violation; you see it in the black jammed klongs, the impassable streets that are convulsed with traffic, and in the temples: every clumsy attempt to repair the latter seems to have been initiated by tourists rather than worshippers. There is a brisk trade in carvings and artifacts stolen from temples upcountry, and this rapacity – new to the once serene Thais – is encouraged by most of the resident foreigners. It is as if these expatriate farangs expect a kind of repayment for the misery of having to live in such an insufferable place. The Thais muddle along, as masseuses and marauders, but a month before I arrived several thousand Thai students (who described themselves rather curiously as “revolutionary monarchists”) marched on the police headquarters, brought down the government, and in the space of an afternoon managed to destroy seven fairly large buildings downtown. It was, like the patchy regilding of the recumbent Buddha, a popular violation, and now the street of gutted buildings is included in the Temple Tour: “Over here you will see where our students burned -“

That was written in the mid 1970s, but if you handed it to me today I wouldn’t know the difference.

BANGKOK, THAILAND
The first time I came to Bangkok will always be the most vivid. I showed up around three in the morning (as one usually does in Bangkok, regardless of your mode of transport), took a taxi to the guesthouse and stowed my bags in a room with nothing but a bed and a fan. Outside there was a pickup truck selling noodles, run by an congenial old man with most of his teeth and a serious penchant for Thai rum. I was eighteen and had never been outside of the US and Europe, paralytically terrified by Bangkok’s tangled streets, but somehow this old guy and his noodles made it all manageable.

I thought it’d be fitting then, on another first night so many years later, to stay in the same place, eat the same noodles and look at the whole thing with new eyes. He’s still there with his pickup truck, shelling out his pork soup for less than a buck a bowl.

by the way, I’d eaten half that bowl before I took the picture. It looked a lot better when it came out.

BANGKOK, THAILAND
Nobody really has any idea how many people live in Bangkok, owing to the undoubtedly massive population of illegal immigrants and slum-dwellers, but the city itself is twenty-five times bigger than DC. You could fit New York, LA, Houston and two Baltimores inside Bangkok and still have room for another state capital or two.

The whole thing is an unbelievable mess. Bangkok’s thoroughfares are such an insane traffic disaster that they’ve built elevated highways that sit above street level on giant concrete pillars. They’re the jungle canopy to the city’s sticky heat, constant noise and cavalcade of bizarre smells, and if you listen to the cars on top you’ll remember what a tiny, tiny part of this enormous metropolitan tumor you are.

No matter how many times I come to this city I will always be completely overwhelmed by it. Every one of the six times I’ve been here I was either scared out of my mind or trying desperately to get out, so I’ve never really explored it in any serious capacity. I resolved to conquer Bangkok this time – to see everything, to make sense of it, to somehow understand the patterns behind its maddening bustle and pollution.

I couldn’t do it. Three days and I was ready to bolt. Bangkok, we’ll meet again.