The skinniest building in Chinatown

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…

Day 7 The Rome restaurant 6pm

After a relaxing day I was ready to head out again and explore, this time to the far Southwest corner of the city where besides a freeway and opposite a very Thai rural-style street market sits “The Rome” -a Thai/Italian restaurant complete with its own semi-Colloseum.

 

Sex and corruption: two very Bangkok museums

I was in Nonthaburi to visit the “This is Us” exhibition by the Empower Foundation, an organisation founded by sex workers to organise for legal protection, offer mutual support and provide education and services. The group runs its own brothel in Chiang Mai (which provides its workers with superannuation, paid leave and follows occupational health and safety protocols), a radio station and this mini-museum if the history of Thai sex work in the Bangkok suburbs.

The museum is small (and dimly lit), located on the dusty floor of a shophouse daubed with slogans like “good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere!” There are some interesting panels on Thai sex work through history. One law in the early nineteenth century forbade sex workers from being called as witnesses in criminal proceedings and punished any former sex workers who married clients and were unfaithful with “working in the fields as a buffalo” – in other words they were literally, chillingly, dehumanised.

Elsewhere there are sets of hotel bed rooms and gogo bars, and discussions of AIDS advocacy issues and human trafficking. The museum costs 100 baht admission and is a great way to support a fantastic organisation.

Further south, in Dusit, the Anti-Corruption Museum takes a similarly unflinching (if better funded – and better lit) look at one of the darker aspects of Thai society.

Day 11am Si Phraya Quay

At the ferry pier at Si Phraya where the riverside Portuguese Embassy, with its beautiful wall mural by street artist Vhils, faces off against the extravagant bronze menagerie of statue store “Asian Enterprises” with its nymphs and mermaids, lifesize bronze gorillas, mooses and hippopotami.

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 2 The Old Protestant Cemetery 10am

  

One of Bangkok’s quietest spaces, the old Protestant cemetery by the river. I swear though, I heard what sounded like a Samsung phone ringing from inside one of the graves!

  

Day 3 3pm Chocolate Ville

A suburban restaurant-themepark seemingly aimed at Malaysian tourists who want to make believe they are in a charming amalgam of Connneticut and the Netherlands  – rather than Lad Phrao.

   

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.

  

Weird weekend

It was a strange, disorienting weekend. The weather veered from rain to the return of the baking heat. I spent Friday night at a friend’s vegetarian restaurant and then we ventured to an obscure location in an industrial building in suburban Fo Tan. A shadowy group of people had gathered in a dark room to watch one of the trippiest movies of all time:

Walking back at midnight, back in Shatin, by the river, I felt utterly disoriented . I had no idea where I was or what I had just seen (and this despite the fact that it was my third time to see the movie!  I had somehow forgotten its impact).

The next day I accompanied my boyfriend to a number of cute little Parisian bars in Tai Hang, through surging post-Ramadan crowds in Victoria Park, ran into a friend at the bakery at the Mandarin Oriental hotel and was suddenly ushered into a property exhibition where, to my surprise, my boyfriend promptly bought a flat.

A strange, anything-goes weekend!

Tokyo secrets

I recently stumbled on to a list of Tokyo attractions which included some surprising, and hitherto-unknown, sightseeing options, such as:

House of the Insect Poet (10 minute walk from Sendago subway station in Bunkyo Ward) is an insect museum inspired by a Japanese translation of famous poem about insects by the French poet Jean-Henri Fabre. Opened in 2006 in a building designed to resemble a cocoon, it houses specimens of insects and butterflies from around the world. Most of the specimens belong to a scholar of French literature who began collecting insects in the fourth grade and has since collected 100,000 specimens.

And who knew there was an ancient Egyptian museum in Shibuya?

Another surprise was the discovery of this very instagram-chic guide to the outer suburb of Fussa, by a very visual-savvy Hong Kong-based food stylist and “social media content provider.” My memories of Fussa are of a down-at-heel, but interesting, dormitory suburb on the Western fringes of Tokyo. I used to pass through every morning on my way to work at a small and shabby “English school” in Ozaku, almost the last gasp of metropolitan Tokyo before suburban sprawl hits the beautiful hills, cedar forests and lakes of the Oku-tama ranges. Fussa stood out for its vast US military base and the streets immmediately surrounding it, which featured Filipino and Thai bars (and bargirls) and family-run Latino restaurants (I was once called a gringo at the local station).  With its white and (more often) brown and black faces, American fast food and slightly raffish, red light air, it actually does provide quite a unique, and interesting, perspective on the metropolis – but not one I would have expected to see style-blogged. Until, that is, I realised that it was a paid promotion for a campaign to highlight more “regional” parts of Tokyo prefecture. Still, certainly worth a look.

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.

Splash!

I spent a fun afternoon on the water-logged streets of Kowloon Tong celebrating the Songkran Thai New Year, complete with a confetti-festooned Buddha paraded through the streets, fraught dodging of water “snipers” and stops in the park to look at the ruins of the old Walled City and watch Thai dancers. Plus: lunch in the brutalist Cooked Food Centre, and one of favourite eccentric local stores, Hong Kong Treasure, with its tin toys, busts, 1980s designerware and art deco jewellery in a gloomy, Gothic building opposite the Walled City park.

 

Hong Kong hidden places #1: Mum’s not home

 

Mum’s Not Home is one of my new favorite Hong Kong hangouts. We first noticed it as a neon light shining in the window of an old Yau ma Tei tenement building, and then climbed up the chipped stairs to find a painted door.

Ringing the bell, we were ushered into a room filled with ferns, racks of colourful clothes on sale, artworks, a papier mache monkey’s head and an oversized menu of sweet drinks and cakes. Avant garde French electro was playing and a saffron-haired HK hipster was taking pictures with his boyfriend against the lush greenery, while a middle-aged woman scooped up rubber dinosaurs on sale.

 

I immediately fell in love.

Hong Kong hidden places #2

Sam’s vinyl museum, on the 12th floor of Causeway Bay’s  Nam Hing Fong building is a small, windowless room housing a plush collection of rare and expensive vinyl records, entered only on condition of sitting through a “lecture” on their history and worth from their excitable owner.

Hong Kong hidden places #3

  

Hidden behind this tiny door in Pok Fu Lam village, opposite the bus stop on Pok Fu Lam Road, is perhaps Hong Kong’s smallest dim sum joint. I’ve never been inside – it seems to be open on weekday afternoons when I’m at work, but one day….

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…

 

Jazz Night at Salon 10

Salon 10 is a bar unlike many others in Hong Kong. It is certainly chic, but also eccentric; not many places could pull off its Henri Rousseau-meets-ET wall mural and Stanley Kubrick-like curved lines. With plush wall banquettes, midcentury furnishings and a rounded ceiling, it feels a little bit like being in a groovy tunnel. Recently, I discovered that the bar is hosting a series of midweek jazz and Latin concerts with free entry, so we decided to go last week and check it out. It was a fun night.

Bana Hills

Less than an hour from the Danang Beaches lies the starkly different – and noticeably cooler – Bana Hills, a fantasy resort made up of a fake French village, located atop a mountain. The resort is reached via the world’s longest cable car which glides up over spectacular jungle scenes – rushing mountain streams, enormous ferns and towering Tarzan-like rainforest trees, before entering the clouds and mists near the mountain’s summit.

  

The “village” itself is mainly home to mediocre restaurants and shoving crowds of Vietnamese tourists, but the sheer scale and slickness of the operation came as a surprise to me (what else did Vietnam have up its sleeve?!), the beauty of the ride up is undeniable and the faux-Alpine village, wreathed in mist, is pleasingly surreal.

Heaven…and hell.

An Gia was our favourite restaurant of the trip, a beautifully furnished traditional home turned Thonglor-style hipster restaurant, serving delicious local food in a leafy courtyard, complete with dogs, kitschy-tasteful ornaments and lovely ceramics. We ate there three times.

This little piece of heaven is located, incongruously, by a dystopian stretch of beach ten minutes from our hotel. Here, the coastline sand had been almost all eroded away, with walls of sandbags left to try and retain what little was left, and shorefront hotels and shops looking forlorn and trashed. It is worth seeing in itself as a metaphor for the things we are doing to our planet – I couldn’t help wondering if sand extraction for cement used in tourism developments had spurred the carnage?

  

Old-fashioned with a twist

  

Tucked away in the leafy well-t0-do suburb of Canterbury, and little-visited by outsiders, is the determinedly quaint Maling Road. This well-preserved stretch of early Victorian shophouses culminates in a cafe in the old post office and, around the corner, one of Melbourne’s most glorious surprises: the Egyptian revival Freemason’s hall.