The end to a glorious adventure

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all” – Helen Keller

This post brings to an end not only my Bangkok trip but also a larger adventure. After ten years (yes, ten!) I have decided to discontinue this blog.

Ilbonito has followed me from Tokyo to rural Australia to Bangkok, Hong Kong and back again, through the start and end of a marriage, and all kinds of tumultuous personal changes. But now the time seems right to take a bow. I am on the cusp of forty, about to start a new chapter and a new decade on a new island, engaged in a hitherto-unknown endeavour, property ownership.

It feels like time for a clean break.

The truth is too that I just don’t have the passion for it that I once did. Perhaps it is encroaching (or arrived!) middle age but I don’t feel the need to document and dissect things the way that I used to. Maybe it is simply that I no longer feel the need to define myself by lists of music I like or films I have seen. At this age, I know who I am and I have nothing left to prove. And after all, aren’t life’s pleasures meant to be transitory and fleeting, not endlessly analysed, recorded and re-lived (or so the Buddhists and modern mindfulness gurus always say) ? This blog has served as a record of the songs I listened to, the books that I read, experiences, sights of my everyday life that surprised or delighted me, my ever-changing obsessions and interests and inspirations and the places I went. But I think its time to let go of that safety net and keep those things only in my memory.

Part of this has been the influence of an author too, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Last year I devoured his “My Struggle” series and it was a revelation:  his writing was so clear, honest and impassioned,  unapologetically delving into the minutae of one man’s life. It made me wonder: what is the purpose of a record like this, writing about my life? Is it to be honest about my emotions, the things that have moved (or frightened) me? If so, this blog is not the right place for it. I can’t be that honest and exposed here (or at least, I don’t have the guts to be).

I need to acknowledge too that changes in the online eco-system have forced my hand. When I started this blog, facebook had not yet launched. The social media tsunami had not hit. In its early days, back in Kanagawa, this project served as a log of social events, pictures of me and my friends and what we did – a function now more than adequately filled by facebook. Over the years, as people have become more reticent about appearing online (and partners especially) I have ceased posting these kinds of things, to reformat as a blog devoted to whatever I consider “interesting” – whether that be architecture or street art or (overwhelmingly the most popular topic with my readers) gay life.

Yet now as everything online moves towards a social network model, the blog format itself is looking increasingly dated. My host, wordpress, was late to pick up on this change and is now scrambling to catch up and monetize: it has introduced a “subscription” model. On another front, photobucket (which hosts most of the images on this blog) is also pushing for payment to host links to third party sites (like this one), a service that had been free. In both cases, the costs are significant. It seems that the day of the vanity personal blog, (as opposed to the corporate webpage or the social media profile), might be ending.

So, I take a bow. On to the next chapter and the next daring adventure.

New horizon

Goodbye song

My summer of 2017 anthem.

Bangkok: the money monster

Bangkok is a late capitalist capital par excellence. Everywhere, from the thronged pavement stalls of the tourists strips, to the plush and shiny malls, the seedy red light bars and the alleyways of Chinatown is laden with stuff: things to buy, services to purchase, all provided with a ready smile. There is no city I can think of  where consumption is so conspicuous, and so varied. If you can’t buy it in Bangkok it likely doesn’t exist. As I once wrote, everything the human mind can devise or imitate is on sale here, often advertised commandingly on giant billboards or slick skytrain commercials. I saw one new (and well-situated) condo development tagged shamelessly, “Make yourself the centre of the universe!”

But this city of instant gratification and temptation can be a fickle monster. Trends are big here. Fads sweep through the city and then ebb away, like tsunamis. One minute everyone is crazy for yakiniku restaurants and then suddenly its all about tapas bars or organic wine. That is part of the fun of the city, gauging its obsessions du jour.

An interesting and unexpected trend I noticed on this trip was that the iconic Thailand elephant pants – beloved of backpackers but something of a running joke among the country’s more fashion forward citizens – have been (re)appropriated by Thai young people. I saw more than a few baggy Koh Phangan-style pants on hip Bangkok youth in the night markets and “walking streets”.

Even more interesting was the adoption of thanaka. The traditional Burmese herbal face-paste, until recently the preserve of the elderly and provincial, has made a big comeback in the capital, with a repackaged version given a push from a local personal care goods company. Charmingly yellow powdered faces were visible (often on working class people) around the city.

At the other end of the spectrum, well-to-do Bangkok seems to be flirting with another unlikely import. The city’s African music scene has always been surprisingly healthy but following the lead of trailblazing world music club Studio Lam, there are now at least two other African music-friendly venues aimed at upwardly mobile locals: 12 x 12, another bar in Thonglor described as a “Japanese hipster’s dream” and Third World Bar, on the second floor of the old Tapas on Silom Soi 4.

A less wholesome trend was one I read about in alarming news reports. Apparently the practice of facial surgery to create dimples – by piercing the cheeks with metal pins – had caught on and was now being practiced by unregulated and unqualified merchants at Chatuchak market, according to the lurid reports in the press.

But metal cheeks and Afro beats aside, the trend that had the biggest impact on my trip was undoubtedly an app. “Grab” is a must-download for anyone spending time in the city, a superior Southeast Asian sister to Uber. Not only is the Malaysian-based app wildly popular  – meaning that a car is never more than a few minutes away –  and cheaper than Uber with a better designed interface, it also eliminates the need to give your driver directions. You enter your destination and it pops up in English on an extremely detailed database, with a map directing your driver right there. No more tortuous conversations about “turn left after the Big C” across a language barrier, or taxi drivers who can’t read maps (or often, read at all, even if you have an address written in Thai). Grab revolutionises the ease with which you can explore Bangkok.

 

Sounds of a city

It impossible to separate a city from your subjective experience of it. Fifteen years ago on my first European tour I arrived in Barcelona depressed and as a result, I found the city cold and unwelcoming. I’ve never warmed to it since. So for me, Bangkok will always now be intertwined with “Despacito” (I was slow to catch on to that one), memories of Games of Thrones watched on computer screens on hotel beds, and the strange discovery of a youtube channel full of deep house remixes with Japanese animation montage video clips – the soundtrack to morning jogs and Nice Palace days.

Greetings from Planet Bangkok

  

An escape

After a solid ten days in Bangkok, but still with more than a week until my boyfriend was due to arrive, I decided to head out of town for a change of scenery. The first plan, excitingly, was to fly to Assam. However, even though the flights were cheap it turned out that the Indian visa was a bureaucractic hurdle I hadn’t factored in so I put that aside for next time.

Instead, I decided (the night before) to hop on a 12-hour bus ride to Thailand’s South. I was up at 5am to the distant Southern Bus Terminus and then off on a slow, rolling journey through the lush green countryside to Krabi.

By the end of the afternoon, the South announced itself outside my window with shacks in gloomy rows of rubber trees, open-back trucks piled with durian and jackfruits,  jadded jungly limestone spires piercing the skyline and the copper domes of small town mosques shining in the dying light of the sun.

From Krabi –  pleasant, prosperous little city – I took a longtail boat across the bay to Railay Beach, a paradise under its dramatic crags. After a day here I moved on to Khao Sok national park, where the same imposing karsts rose not out of the ocean but out of a jade green lake and a thick ancient rainforest.

The glorious South

   

Day 8 8pm Sala Daeng

 

So its come to this: my wild night out in Silom on this trip was a wingbean salad at Baan Ying, and an overpriced coffee on the terrace of the new Dean & Deluca, watching the world going by, and listening to Mariya Takeuchi. 😉

Day 9 Rot Fai Park 6am

My early morning jogs in Rot Fai park have been one of the revelations of this trip; my run this morning was a virtual safari with a near-attack from a gaggle of over-excited geese, almost tripping over a lumbering monitor lizard and another trip down the “Squirrel avenue” of trees alive with darting furry shapes.

 

Day 5 10pm City of a Thousand Planets

I went into Central World on Tuesday night to see a movie, and as luck would have it, picked this one. Something about it spoke to me: a gloriously over-the-top adventure set in a dazzling, decadent “city of a thousand planets”. It had more than a touch of Bangkok about it. Leaving the film was an even more surreal experience as the film wound up at midnight and I exited to a huge, gloomily abandoned mall, empty except for a pitch black but seething mens bathroom, out a side corridor where manual workers were furiously lugging in boxes of mysterious cargo, and out disorientingly on to dark and quiet streets I only ever see in the day. Through a taxi window, I saw a sparkling faced drag queen clown wander past a food stall where some tired construction workers ate under a fluorescent light, and then whizzed back to my adopted home “planet” of Saphan Kwai.

Bangkok: mixing business with pleasure

After a long and excited wait, I’m back in Bangkok. It feels like a while since I have been here, and of course, in the meantime the city has been spinning away at a furious rate, erecting new museums and leisure districts, razing old areas, unveiling new parks, sweeping up street vendors and – not least of all – constructing the condo tower where I have bought my own little slice of the city.

As always, the city is filled with surprises and superlative people-watching: a woman selling a live stingray in a plastic bag (for 1200 baht!), teenagers speaking Japanese with broad Singaporean accents in Siam Square, a hot pants-high heels-hijab combo on a shopper in MBK and an elderly Korean gentleman on the prowl in Soi Thaniya wearing an immaculate florid 1980s designer shirt with a loud toucan pattern.

Middle aged women, especially in the more rural outer suburbs, were still dressed in their black lace mourning gowns for the late King and the monks of course were draped in orange.

I also saw hot Latin boys at Chatuchak, a cute chunky guy in black shorty shorts and an apparition-like fruit peddlar with her face daubed in geisha-like sun protection. Plus: beautiful confused looking blondes at Patpong with annoying Scandinavian children, security guards with whistles and flashlights cycling through Lumpini Park at closing time, statuesque transgendered party people and a presentable-looking white hipster with a half-face tattoo sipping a beer and listening to house music.

I was also surprised by some of the city’s non-human residents: leaping kittens in bars (!) and in alleys, and a small cage on a footpath near my hotel. Inside it was a  fish head on a hook and (on closer inspection) a terrified shrew hiding in one corner.

Nonetheless, it felt good to be back to a city where life seems so electrically charged with the bizarre, the beautiful and the unpredictable. Bangkok is many things, but never mundane.

I was in town on property-related business and so I stayed in Saphan Kwai, the northern neighbourhood where my condo was slowly taking shape. In the meantime, I had elected to stay in the “Nice Palace”, one of the dated, second-tier Thai hotels that I always like. I was happy there, waking up every morning to the sounds of frogs,  or looking out to evening lightning strikes or brilliant sunny skies, curtains fluttering in the breeze from the gardens below my balcony, a hidden world invisible from the street filled with huge old rain trees and tangled thickets alive with birds.

Ten minutes away Saphan Kwai buzzed with activity, gritty and vibrant: hawkers sold fruit, jasmine garlands and fried chicken, while amulet sellers and some of the city’s best street food were all in evidence on the walk to the skytrain along oil-splattered footpaths. One night walking home I heard a busker playing a clarinet – beautifully – outside a 7-11 next to the shrine where Chinese opera sometimes plays. In a dank arcade, a row of women sat at work on what looked like nineteenth century sewing machines.

Shops here sell Thai costumes for children, cheap clothes, old Buddha statues and benjarong and second hand books. The footpaths are awful, motorcycles speed out of secretive side alleys and there are cats and dogs lazing in the midday sun everywhere. It is a neighbourhood I can’t wait to get to know better.

Hotel

   

Day 1 Ansell & Elliott cafe 11am

Saphan Kwai hipster!

Day 1 10pm

Rain, rain, rain. Its been a soggy few days in Hong Kong with thunderstorms sweeping through the city, gushing subtropical rains and occassionally lighter showers falling across the grey, gloomy city. Socks are soaked and cold water has been running down my back all day. Kind of nice to be home now in my cozy little apartment, listening to the raindrops and listening to the rolling thunder – but at the same time, some sun tomorrow would be nice.

Food food food

This weekend I tried some interesting new dishes: fatty and delicious pork cooked in spicy Hunanese sauce and served in fresh, doughy bread from Cafe Hunan, a fermented squid paste in a Japanese restaurant (it was called “pirate” on the menu) and this astonishing vegetarian Hainan “chicken” rice at one of my favourite places, Veggie SF. It looked and tasted delicious!

Across the Lamma straits

  

A day on Lamma

  

We spent a day on the summery island of Lamma, leaving from the busy working harbour at Aberdeen, alive with sampans and bright flags atop fishing vessels moored in the harbour, across the busy straits where huge cargo ships powered by, and up to the green forested shores of the island, under a clear, piercingly hot blue sky. The idea was to some village houses in tangled green fields and groves of banana trees, before walking into the main settlement of Yung Shue Wan. Here we stopped for a much-needed cool pitstop in a boho-hipster cafe, drinking good coffee book and reading books off the shelf, before heading off again. This time we followed the busy walking track out of town to “Power station beach”, where the famous “tofu fa” sweet tofu dessert woman has set up her stall under the spreading branches of an old, shady banyan tree.

 

Slipping the beach, with its swarms of mainlanders and rather offputting view of the coal-burning power station chimneys, we pressed on, soon soaked in sweat, over blazing hillsides and shady valleys to one of the island’s quieter beaches, to sit and look up at the jungly canopy or swim with swarms of flying fish in the sea. After a few hours, with rain suddenly threatening, we hot-footed it on to the island’s second settlement, with the boyfriend limping from a wound to his foot (having stepped on submerged rocks at the beach) and me sheltering from the rain under a fallen banana leaf, to the seafood strip of Sok Kwu Wan, to eat before the journey home.