The ghost tower is ready for its close-up

A primal scream from Bangkok’s collective unconscious: the towering vortex that is the Sathorn Unique has become the setting for a new Thai horror, “The Promise”.

The building is the most high profile of the cities “ghost towers,” never-completed reminders of the 1997 stock market crash that have dotted the city skylines for decades afterwards.

Towering conspicuously over one of the city’s busiest transport interchanges at Saphan Taksin, the brooding concrete shell of the Sathorn Unique has become a Bangkok urban legend and a magnet for graffiti artists and urban adventurers from around the world.

In new movie “The Promise” the tower is the scene of a teenage suicide pact. When one of the pair survives, and returns to the still-derelict building twenty years later, the ghost of her friend tries to see that she makes good on her promise…

City wild

The ever-reliable Coconuts Bangkok site reports on attempts to put “Uncle Fatty,” a notoriously chubby suburban monkey, on a diet here.

Meanwhile, a restaurant has been busted serving endangered species to Chinese tourists. The Luang To To restaurant was found to be serving cobras, andangered soft shell turtles and pangolin meat to its guests. This follows on from the revelations of tiger meat being served in the city a few years ago.

Day 4 12.30 pm Cobra Queen Mother Shrine on Rama II

I think I was a bit early, better to go in late afternoon. I didn’t see any snakes this time although I had a heart attack when a lizard slithered out of some foliage.

Day 3: Queen Sirikit Park 5.30pm

The end of my first weekend back in Bangkok: the weekly gathering of Thai groundhog owners in the park behind Chatuchak Market.

  

Hong Kong: horrible histories

Facts I learned from Jan Morris’s charmingly dated (it was written in the 1990s by an author most interested in British colonial history) book about Hong Kong:

• The pre-colonial inhabitants of the area suffered from a “horror called Xhu Mao Bing, the Bristle Disease,whose victims found spiky bristles like pig–hairs (sometimes apparently fish–scales, too} sprouting through their skin.” Curious, I looked this up online but couldn’t find any other reference to it anywhere.
• In 1857 a Chinese nationalist plot poisoned the city’s bread supply, (presumably few Chinese ate bread in those days so it was a cunning way to target the British administrative elite). The dosage of arsenic was miscalculated however, so that the poisoning lead to mass European vomitting but not death, and the colonial regime survived.
• The first ever hijacking of an aeroplane occurred in 1940 on a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Macau by sea pirates looking to diversify.
• Smoking opium was legal until 1940.
• Under the Japanese occupation, Queens Road Central was re-named Naka Meiji-dori and a monumental Shinto temple was planned for construction on the Peak (but blown up when the occupation ended).
• It was not until 1981 that the census recorded more than 50% of the population had been locally born, rather than migrants from the mainland. So in other words, the influx of people (and money) from the mainland is nothing new. Rather, the brief relative lull during the 1980s and 1990s was the outlier.

Southeast Asia Weird

In just about the least horrifying news out of Indonesia this week (scroll up) , the decomposing body of a “sea monster” washed up on one of its beaches. It is, most likely, the carcass of a whale.

Meanwhile Bangkok experienced a new food fad, with a bakery in Pathum Thani gaining online fame for this adorable/creepy dog-shaped coconut puddings. Can’t wait to eat on of these puppies…literally.

And finally in Singapore, a new “vending machine” for luxury cars opened in the form of an arrestingly designed showroom where with the flick of a switch you can “select” the car you want to test.

Japanese ghost story

Scenes from the Kaikidan Ekotoba, a nineteenth century Japanese scroll illustrating 33 kinds of monsters said to inhabit the wilds of Kyushu and Korea.

   

BKK ruins

 

With swathes of central Bangkok facing the wrecking ball, its a good time to discover the urbex photography of Dax Ward, who has documented the ruins of Bangkok’s ghost skyscrapers, train and aeroplane graveyards and sites like this abandoned Cape Crusader-themed nightclub on Pattaya’s ‘Soi Batman’.

See more at daxward.com.

Bangkok werewolf

The new Thai celebrity trend – pet werewolves.

At The Instagram Pier

A friend was leaving town this weekend, and hosted her “adieu Hong Kong” bash at the ‘Instagram Pier’, a cargo loading bay that has become a de facto public park in cramped Hong Kong. Located along the Kennedy Town waterfront, it was known for many years as a gathering spot for Hokkien-speaking seniors to play mahjong and listen to Chinese opera ( there was some there this weekend) as well as a premium spot for thrill-seekers to watch typhoon waves during the Summer storms. Recently, it has been adopted by hipsters and those seeking the perfect Hong Kong harbour sunset pic (hence the name).

Arriving on a cold and drizzly Saturday night, we walked past vast piles of bamboo poles, ready to be hauled across town for construction projects, by the lines of bobbing tugboats in the dark sea and into the shelter afforded by a little cargo hut. People were walking dogs with neon-glowing collars, cruising past on bikes or skateboards, someone was flying a drone. A woman in a red dress was doing a photo-shoot and some girls were shooting a semi-professional-looking music video while a large group of young Japanese lay on tatami mats, having a picnic.

The highlight though was an impromptu serenade by a string quartet, playing atop a grafittied cargo crate. They popped up, played beautifully and then melted away again into the night…

 

New sensation

 

Thailand led the world in embracing internet-sensation-du-jour, the headbanging “trash dove” – now more sinisterly co-opted by white nationalists online.

The Essex Serpent

The “Essex Serpent” by Sarah Parry has been my holiday reading. It is based on a 1669 pamphlet entitled “Strange news out of Essex” which told the story of a dragon-like creature terrorising the swamps of the then-rural English county, now located on the outskirts of greater London. Intriguingly, Parry has picked up this real-life inspiration and re-imagined a story set two hundred years later. In the Victorian era, where Charles Darwin’s ideas are being hotly debated and British high society society has become fascinated by strange specimens streaming in from all over the empire, an upper-class London moves to Essex and hears rumblings of the serpent, said to have arisen in the Essex “Blackwater.”

Green ghosts

Shrouded in ivy and fog, abandoned houses stand on the island of Shengshan, an overnight trip from Shanghai. I had wanted to go and see the ghost villages on the island, deserted by the fishermen who once lived there and now throng to work in the cities, but with limited transport options (and Chinese) I decided against it.

Shanghai, by David Lynch.

Paris, China.

Other than the West Lake, the other item on my Hangzhou hitlist was a housing estate in the city’s far suburbs, a twenty minute taxi ride from the last stop on the Northern subway line. But this was not just any housing estate, but Tianducheng, an ill-fated replica of Paris, complete with its own Eiffel Tower.

 

Despite the amazing scale and spectacle of the place, it was noticeably quiet when we arrived. A gust of cold wind blew a plastic bag down the street, eerily vacant except for a couple of construction workers and maintenance crew and a bridesmaid playing with her phone on a park bench in a sparkly yellow dress, as a distant procession of brides and grooms climbed the steps to the mini-Sacre Coeur for wedding pictures. Most of the shops along the avenues were vacant or closed. We wandered around the dusty streets, ate delicious Uighur food on the Champs Elysee, and then caught a ride back to China.

Is Jiangsu the hot new China destination?

 

Although most of the province is less that two hours by train from Shanghai, and it includes the supposedly beautiful “garden city” of Suzhou, I didn’t make it to Jiangsu on this trip.

The provincial capital of Nanjing, once of course China’s capital and scene of one of the grisliest massacres of World War 2 (the “Rape of Nanking”) has recently been hard at work upgrading its tourist credentials.

I was intrigued by a poster in a Shanghai train station adverising the newly-opened Usnisa Buddhist complex on Nanjing’s outskirts, a hyper-modern and lavishly-scaled temple complex perched on a mountain slope. Similarly over-the-top in design is the reconstruction, completed this year, of the city’s “Porcelain Pagoda”, a wonder destroyed some 150 years ago and now rebuilt by China’s richest man, with an an(other) Buddhist themepark attached.

And finally there is the Sifang art complex, peeking out from the treetops in a pair of sleek architecturally-driven boxes, also just outside the city. I was reminded again of Japan in the bubble years, when these costly prestige projects came so thick and fast that no-one could keep track of them, and spectacular buildings that should have been star attractions flew completely under the radar.

But it doesn’t take long for the old China to reassert itself. The province is also home to a safari park in nearby Yancheng that has eleven stuffed giraffes on display, placed as a reminder not to feed the animals after they choked to death on plastic bags fed to them by visitors 😦

Unexpected

While browsing at Kubrick’s, this blog’s favourite Hong Kong cafe and art book hipster hangout, I stumbled across this strange object earlier in the week and I immediately felt a keen pang of homesickness and nostalgia. It is, in case you are wondering, an essential oil fragrance diffuser, carved out of the case of the Australian banksia bush nut. Such a quintessentially Australian sight, beautiful and yet weirdly alien to the Eurocentric gaze, appearing in a totally unexpected context. I bought it immediately, and I love it. It reminds me of the “banksia men,” villains in the 1918 childrens’ book “The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddle Pie,” which I had once derided as the height of tacky, cringeworthy Australiana kitsch, until I had seen the classic illustrations featured in a shirt by ubercool designer Eley Kishimoto in Tokyo’s So-En magazine: another re-evaluation of something I had once not appreciated.

 

 

Three Meals

Expensive but elegant Vietnamese cuisine at Garcon Saigon, off Star Street.

A disappointing meal at Yunnan People restaurant. The rice noodles with tofu were tasty, but I had come all the way to the dreary industrial suburb of San Po Kong for the restaurant’s menu of imported-from-Yunnan bugs: fried crickets, grubs and beetles, none of which were available on the rainy day I visited. Oh well.

And finally, new Kennedy Town favourite Orchid Veggie, with its sea grapes, tasty fried eggplant, mushroom platter (below) and durian cupcakes.

Suoi Tien

Suoi Tien is one of the highlights of – I would say – Southeast Asia. It is a vast and bizarre fantasyland of gaudy Buddhist sculptures, neon shrines and concrete oversized fruit, dancers in monkey suits, a water park with a wave machine, houses-of-horror and live crocodiles (which you can buy and take home!) and dolphins jumping through hoops of fire. It is also, inexplicably, not mentioned anywhere in the Vietnam Lonely Planet guide. Really? Someone should really get fired for that, as it is hands down one of the most bizarre, mind-boggling sights on the planet and an absolute “must-do.” Read more on my previous visit here.  To get there, just hop on the number 19 bus opposite the Ben Thanh market. It takes about an hour and drops you right at the door which is marked by a gigantic frog, and therefore unmissable. When the city’s subway is up and running it will get a stop nearby so it will be even easier.

The aerial drone video below should provide some more inspiration to visit (if that could possibly be necessary) although ignore the misleading claim that the park is “abandoned”  – it was just filmed after closing time, I would say.

Mixed-up world

District Three, a brief walk from the Reunification Palace, is a neighbourhood of local middle class shopping, street noodle vendors, raucous markets and a big hospital. It is also here, away from the gaze of tourists, that a small local hipster scene is starting to blossom. As well as as an ‘Analog cafe’ and some vintage stores set up in peoples’ living rooms, a small alley hosts one of the city’s prime hipster hangouts, Liem Barbershop.

Modelled after Chicano gangsters, in a craze itself imported from Thailand, the barbers here represent Saigon’s globalised counter culture spirit  – and the place is consistently packed out. Its the kind of place I didn’t know existed in Saigon and perhaps an interesting peek at where the city is heading?

Museum of History

The National Vietnamese History museum sits in a 1920s Orientalist fantasy at the entrance to Botanical Gardens. Ceiling fans whir above the high-faulted chambers and breezes blow through the corridors and courtyards, and birds coo outside in the branches of huge rainforest trees. The rather dusty collection contains agricultural tools, dioramas of Vietnamese military victories over the Chinese and the Mongols and the Mummy of District Five, the preserved body of an aristocratic woman who died in 1868 and was unearthed in the city in 1994, as well as memorabilia of the vanished Vietnamese royal houses.

 

The highlight is probably the sensuous collection of Khmer and Champa stone scupture, but my favourite piece was this hauntingly elongated and androgynous two-metre figure of Buddha. Carved out of weathered wood and starting some two metres tall, the faceless figure stands serenely, looking for all the world like a member of some benevolent alien race, about to bestow his or her wisdom on our benighted planet – if only we would listen.