There's only one stop. Seoul to Bangkok

Packed up at 7am and left the Kobos Love Motel, where my school had put me up, and South Korea, bound for Bangkok. The motel was an interesting venue to stay and I'll miss the free internet and 50 inch TV screen, but not the Korean TV shows or the bedside condom packets and 'I Love You' desensitizing cream (to show how much I love her?), that I was tempted to rub on my forehead to numb the mundanity of 3am essay marking. Then off to the airport, kindly escorted by Mel and Jo, and onward to Hong Kong then Bangkok.

Thursday

The little of Bangkok I saw in a jet-lagged stupor on the airport bus was a mix of Old Nicosia, Chicago and Beijing. Just another Asian city, I guess. I woke from an exhaustion coma on Ko San Road, Oh! the sights and sounds of Bangkok's traveller street: Jack Johnson, Roy Orbison, Chelsea shirts, 'English breakfast 40Baht', stalls offering an abundance of tack or forged TEFL certificates, driver's licenses and presscards, and thankfully some Thai people and food. Queuing to get money, a tough, skin-headed Glaswegian we'll call 'Jimmy' surprised me with his confession of living here in a temple to learn Thai massage from the monks. Wafts of coal-roasting chicken kebabs teased my hunger but I opted for the safer triple choc Cornetto. The heat and damp were creeping up and my drenched chest seemed doubly uncomfortable after Korea's sub-zero temperature and lip-crackingly dry air. Ko San seems to me like an Ibiza without a beach so getting south to a small, non-traffic island next to Burma can't come quick enough.
Rob turned up an hour later as I devoured yoghurts (probably the best way to ingest the new tummy bacteria) and we taxied to an electronics mart before an exhilarating dash on a 'tuk tuk', through the most polluted and hectic streets I've ever been on. Our motorised 3-wheeled scooter taxi driver offered to charge us only 10B (16p) for the ride if we made "only 1 stop" at a travel agent that gave him a 500B petrol coupon. He even suggested driving us across Thailand to the Malaysian border, but that 4km ride through Bangkok was enough for me.

Typical 'tuk tuk' taxi

The street cafe lunch of Thai curry was indescribably delicious: a coconutty chilli green soup full of vegetables, roots, leaves and quartered fruits that resembled a fusion of lime and fig. The only vegetable I recognised was the carrot. Among the stream of women peddling bracelets and wooden frogs that 'croak' when their spiny backs are scraped with a stick unexpectedly and shockingly came a toothless pensioner who wasn't quite with it, who was offering herself sexually for 30p. Drifting behind her was the biggest congregation of Western people I've seen in a year, and I couldn't help staring at hips and thin lips and pointed noses. I was also reminded how much I don't miss bad postures and drooping shoulders, and Radio 1 DJ-like southern accents suggesting, "Roight! Let's get straight inta da mixa", which I presume is related to partying and not cement? So many of these hippie wannabes were probably Guardian-reading law graduates and I couldn't control my laughing outburst at, "Tarquin, come here", followed by, "Well, what's your bloody name then?", from a gangly and miffed-looking Tarquin.
I made it 22 hours without imodium!
Rob and I discussed how the West will be able to compete against Asia in terms on manufacturing; the sheer volume of cheap goods I've seen marketed in Asia is just suffocating. "Ah! but they can't beat us on health and safety or bureaucracy". As if to reinforce his point, Rob led us to a bar called The Petrol Station, which unbelievably is a closed-for-the-evening Esso petrol station. Spread across the forecourt were tables and seated Westerners drinking 'buckets', 1 litre buckets filled with rum, ice, coca-cola and Red Bull, dispensed from a VW campervan-cum-bar complete with DJ and decks at a shelf where the rear window once was. Smokers dropped their ash and cig ends onto the concrete between the petrol pumps, with no thought about whether petrol had been spilled there earlier in the day.

The petrol station bar

The Thai people are extremely friendly, smily and open. Yes I'm on tourist street and they want my money, but I feel they are much more genuine than that. Oh! the Thai ladyboy urban myth is fact! Many of the male bar/hostel staff are so effeminate: long hair held up with pretty clips, camp voices, slapping Rob's bum on the street, and the internet cafe 'chap' has a padded bra under his white tank top that shows off his big and toned biceps.
My first, "where next?" was answered by Anna and Jo and tonight Rob and I are overnight bussing south to Ranong and a small island, Ko Payam, just of the coast of Myanmar/Burma....