Moving Continents

My airport shuttle didn't show up at 3 p.m. yesterday in Bangkok.

Fortunately, the travel agent was aware of it and at five past three, she was on the phone with the shuttle, demanding to know why they hadn't arrived yet.

The shuttle had been cancelled as no one else had booked. They'd just forgotten to tell her.

I was lucky—there was a meter taxi looking for a fare right outside the travel agent's office. He zipped me over to Phayathai Skytrain station where I jumped on the airport train, making it to Bangkok's airport in no time.

The Thai Airways flight was amazing for an economy flight. I kept thinking they'd bumped me up to Business Class—that's how much leg room I had.

Unfortunately, due to a blip in the Star Alliance round-the-world ticket, I had to fly to Sydney and then take Virgin Blue (which is red, due to a blip in Australian culture) back to Perth, which isn't really all that far from Bangkok. But there was nothing the alliance could do get me from Perth to Sydney, so I would have had to fly back to Asia then back to Australia to get from Perth to Sydney.

But Who Would Hamburglar Support?

So who would win in a fair fight? Thai Ronald or Bangkok Leprechaun?

Both of these guys live on Khao San Road.

Leaving Asia

I've packed up and left my bags at Sakul House hotel reception. I had a last pad thai—a disappointing one—and will get one last Thai massage before heading to the airport on the 3 p.m. shuttle.

The tourist bus doesn't run anymore from Khao San Road to the airport, but the shuttles are only 130 baht door-to-door. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to use them FROM the airport, so for that I've been taking the airport train to Phayathai and catching a meter taxi from there.

The unusual here is normal now and I am not phased by much in Bangkok. When I think back to when I first arrived in June and remember how excited I was by a modern, clean room and sticky rice, I have to laugh. Small things struck me as delightful on my first day in after four months in Africa. I'd been excited by free bottled water and iced coffee. And of course, the chance to get my parasites seriously checked out.

Exhaling

Bangkok held its breath as the Chao Phraya River continued to swell.

Then Saturday passed.

And Soi Rambuttri and Khao San Road were still dry.

For a tourist ghetto that was sparsely populated due to the exodus of both Thais and tourists to higher ground, Banglamphu sure made a large, triumphant amount of noise on Saturday and Sunday nights. And then tonight, Thai teenagers roamed the blocks, appearing to thoroughly enjoy themselves—even though the only people wearing Halloween costumes were the vendors and little kids out with their parents.

There had been panic-buying, evacuations, and a lot of quick-studies in water control. The low-lying neighborhoods alongside the river had gotten walloped. Even Chatuchak Market had closed this weekend. (No new zebra shirts for me. Boo-hoo!)

But we were unscathed over in backpacker central.

This doesn't mean it's over—something could break. Something unexpected could happen. No one has dismantled their retaining walls yet, or thrown away their sandbags. But there is more confidence now that barring an unexpected catastrophe, those who are dry now will continue to be dry.

Sunday Morning in Banglamphu

Episode 4 in the YouTube animated series by Roosuflood is up on what to do to protect your home and family from the Bangkok floods. Where can I get a broom to defend small children from sea monsters, or is it too late, like getting bottled water from 7-11?

I've just dropped off my last load of laundry and I'm starting to get sentimental. I'm flying out from Thailand to Australia on Tuesday. I won't be back this way for some time. I never would have thought it would have been from 2003-2011 in between my last visits to Bangkok. I'd hate for it to be another eight years.

Here are links to my other photos of the flooding/non-flooding:

Sunday and Monday
Wednesday
Friday night

We still don't have flood waters in my part of the city, though I've heard across the khlong, they're taking on water (they're by the river). Here's evidence that Rambuttri is dry, as the red coconut seller of Khao San Road gets ready for the day this morning.

Khao San Road, Flood 2011

We're still dry here. Have a look at this photo I snapped a few minutes ago on Khao San Road, at 1:30 p.m. Bangkok time.

Evening Flood Review

This fort doesn't usually have a moat.

It's just gotten dark here on Friday night in Bangkok. We're still under a severe flood warning so I went over to the river at sunset to see how high the Chao Phraya River had risen since I shot video on Wednesday night.

The difference in Banglamphu is not too bad. The water has risen, for sure, but given the state of disaster everyone was prepared for, we're going pretty well. I could still walk out to the river taxi pier, but this time, it was good I was wearing my Tevas as the water came midway up my shins. A Buddhist nun was there too, and we both marveled at the submerged walkway.

And then I saw a snake. Not on the pier. Coming out of a hole in the sidewalk just up from the river taxi entrance. A Thai man scared it away by banging a loud container. I didn't go too close...it was a scary-looking snake.

Here are a few photos I snapped a few minutes ago.

And in case you are worried that I am in a flood, I'm not. I have to actively go over to the river to seek out the river overcoming its banks. We have a little rain tonight, but no flooding.

The last photo is of my street. No water in sight.

Gauging the Morning

Morning on Soi Rambuttri. The sun was already high over Banglamphu, as the Khao San tourist area slowly came to life.

As I have been in the mornings for the past few days, I edged over to the window to look down at the ground.

Dry. Dry as a...well, road without water on it. A monk in his orange robe was asking for alms. A woman was sweeping away the leaves in the gutter, as she had every morning this week. The middle-aged pudgy coconut seller with a mohawk was there, completely dressed in red as he is every day. He prepared his coconut cart with a bored look, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Then I heard shrieking. Squealing. Could that be the sound of the first bits of flood waters lapping at the western end of the block?

No. It was a bar girl, downstairs in the sidewalk cafe. Five British guys, two Thai bar girls, a lot of empty beer bottles. They'd been there a while, from the looks of it.

The skies were blue, the sun was out, and the streets of Banglamphu were dry. No change from last night. I mean, aside from the spa worker who had been bored from lack of customers no longer knitting from a bench, the busker who sings American Pie no longer going on about levees being dry.

On Dry Ground in Khao San Road

Here's some advice I gave on the Wanderlust site on the reality of tourism on the ground in Bangkok.

They took out the part about the international airport being unlikely to close unless there is an imminent zombie invasion. Not sure why.

The Whales Are Coming from Inside the House

A friend of mine stumbled over this brilliant animation about the Bangkok floods today.

It's wonderful.

The Chao Phraya River Seeps into Banglamphu

I went over to the river tonight, to see just how bad the flooding was in my part of town.

And I was amazed at what I saw. In a good way. When life gives the people of Banglamphu lemons, they make swimming pools.

Pretending En Masse

After the flurry of news and if-it-bleed-it-leads sensational flood coverage, I had tried to make some sort of flood preparations. But how do you prepare for a possible flood of water when you live on the fourth story of a hotel? The supermarkets were bare of bottled water, so I hoarded the water the hotel left me every day. I have a mini-fridge in my room, but if we were inundated with water, wouldn't the electricity be out? I bought some Oreos and peanuts, but they looked good so I ate them. I put credit on my iPhone, but I then used it up SMS messaging with Stephanie from Singapore when she was in the Bangkok airport en route home from Bhutan.

I did keep my laptop, phone, and camera charged.

"Why didn't you leave," asked Toby up in Chiang Mai, once the buses were full and it was too late to evacuate. He'd been following the news, and the stories of people who lost everything didn't jive with my personal accounts that the only water we had on the streets in Bangkok's center was from a leaky food cart.

Why indeed?

It didn't seem like I'd gain much by leaving. My flight to Sydney, which would connect me on a Virgin Blue flight to Perth, is on November 1. And the big airport isn't going underwater, barring something catastrophic like an unexpected zombie invasion or the moon crashing into the earth. What if I evacuated and then in the madness of people returning to Bangkok, I couldn't get back in time for my plane?

Worldwide Shortage of Zebra Shirts (Crisis Mode)

One thing I really needed to get while I was in Bangkok was more zebra T-shirts.

I'd had no idea that zebras were a good-luck animal until I'd started stumbling over them at spirit houses in June. I'd gamely bought some zebra shirts and I adored them, but like any $5 T-shirt, they had a short shelf life.

I headed out to Chatuchak Market on the #3 bus. This was an interesting ride today as I got on the first #3 bus that came, and the conductor told me to get off. "No, no, you want #3 bus!"

Er. Okay. 

The next #3 bus took ages to show up, but at least I didn't get thrown off again. I need to remember to walk over a block to catch the #524 heading north for next time...except that will probably be in a year or more, by which time I'll have completely forgotten that I desperately need the good luck of the Thai zebra.

The bus got out to Chatuchak quickly, and we only passed one instance of flooding. I hightailed it over to Kamphaeng Phet metro which is next to (and weirdly, in) the more interesting indie clothing shops of Chatuchak and...

gasp

The zebra T-shirt store was shut.

Maybe the shop owner is out building a retaining wall and waterproofing his home, I thought as I glumly walked through the puppy and monitor lizard section of Chatuchak, before catching the #524 back to Banglamphu.

Three Feet High and Rising

I caught the Chao Phraya river taxi down to Tha Thien—that's the pier by Wat Po—to meet my friend Lynne. The few of you who have been reading since 2001 may recall Lynne from when she dropped by to visit in Berlin in May, 2001, or from when we met up a few months earlier in Cambodia and Vietnam during MariesWorldTour.com 2001.

Lynne was in town en route from Myanmar to the UK (the Myanmar boycott has recently been lifted, did you know? Mindful tourism is now being encouraged). I headed down to Tha Thien to meet her and her traveling companion for a drink and dinner.

And when I got off the river taxi, I jumped off the boat and onto the pier as usual, along with six others. Two Dutch tourists walked ahead of me. Two tourists behind me were good sports and followed the Dutch guy off the boat, but two more saw what lie ahead and got right back on.

Unexpected Encounter

"Whoa, the river!" I couldn't contain my amazement when I walked up to the Banglamphu Pier. The pier itself floats, rising with the level of water in the river. But the walkway leading to the pier was submerged. Bangkok was in a state of moderate emergency. Would we be flooded or not?

The woman selling me the ticket (the river taxi had gone up between July and my last visit in September—a ticket is now 15 baht) nodded and smiled. She'd been looking at this all day and she was still amazed.

I tiptoed over the water, using the sandbags as stepping stones across the flooded walkway—I hadn't expected this, so I was wearing my leather sandals and not my Tevas—and climbed up to the pier.

The pier floats, but the surrounding items do not. The pier was so high that this street light was at head level. One false move, and--WHAM--tourist head meets street light.

A Sense of Urgency

On my first full day back in Bangkok, I sat in Coffee World in the Buddy Lodge complex on Khao San Road, my usual pre-lunch haunt. I'm at my most productive between breakfast and lunch, provided I'm out of the house and have a late-morning coffee in front of me. I needed to get to the supermarket to pick up soap and buy credit for my phone, and I needed to go to Chatuchak Market to replace my worn-out zebra T-shirts, but those could wait until I'd done some email housekeeping and processed some files for one of my freelance jobs.

The morning was bright, the sun brilliant. This wasn't what I'd expected when I'd flown back from Bali yesterday. I'd known there was flooding—major flooding—in Thailand, but Bangkok had mostly been left alone. When I'd left it in mid-September, the monsoon season had brought in reliable, dramatic rains. Same as every year.

But the images of other parts of Thailand were scary. Water up to the roofs of houses, people driving boats through towns.

Anyway, I had to get back to Bangkok. My British friend Lynne was due in on the 22nd of October for one night—she'd been one of the first on the ball when the tourism boycott against Myanmar had been lifted and was on her way home—and I was going to meet her for a meal, plus my onward round-the-world ticket was out of Bangkok on November 1st. Sooner or later, all roads lead through Bangkok in this part of the world. Anyway, floods seemed less scary than Bali's 6.0 earthquake we'd had a few weeks ago. That had left me a little paranoid.

I sat outside in the smoking section of Coffee World. I hate the smell of smoke, but the Arctic-level air conditioning inside isn't tolerable for too long, and I planned on being here until I had to pee or my laptop battery ran down, whichever came first.

Back to Bangkok. Again.

But...but...I just got here.

How could it have already been a month? Okay, 27 days. I'd planned on staying a month but then I'd gotten the news that my pal Lynne would be in transit through Bangkok on Saturday night. And I'd bought my AirAsia ticket to get back to Bangkok the day before she did. I'd leave ten days later, using the next stop on my round-the-world ticket to get to Australia.

My former home. Somewhere I'd be now if things had just gone a tiny bit differently. I wasn't sure I wanted to return.

Bangkok to Singapore

I was packing up to head out of Bangkok to Singapore, when I discovered slime in the Zip-Loc bag that held all my just-in-case pharmaceuticals. And how long had those seven acetaminophen pills been melted together?

Travel=glamour, I thought as I scrubbed out all my Zip-Locs in the bathroom sink.

I'd taped together my compression packing bag which had somehow split open, and I'd put a rubber band around my travel soap dish, which had been broken by the cleaner on Sunday. Had it happened on, oh, say, Saturday, I could have gotten a new one. But I'd only learned this in the shower now. I could probably find a good travel store in Singapore. My friend Stephanie would know one, or Larry Hama's friend Gabrielle. I had actual people to see in Singapore.

My pack gets heavier with every bit I throw away, I thought as I hoisted my bag onto my back to head down to the airport shuttle.

Yes, I was taking the plane instead of the train. AirAsia is one of those budget airlines where you end up saving money by flying. You have to be on top of it, remembering to disable the automatic flight insurance and the thing that wants you to pay ten bucks for a seat with extra leg room, but even if I had left those on, I'd be paying way less than if I took the sleeper train for two overnights and paid for a night in Penang (the train has a layover there).

Gearing up in Bangkok

My internal clock was off and so I awoke at six in the morning in my little room in Bangkok. All my physical clocks were messed up too. My phone, my laptop, and my travel alarm clock all disagreed about the current time. And they were all wrong, and had been wrong since I'd gotten onto the plane in Bhutan.

Of course, time passes differently in Thailand so it's okay.

Out the window, a scantily clad still-wobblingly-drunk couple narrowly missed bumping into a monk holding out a pot of rice for his morning alms. I sat up and thought about what I needed to do in Thailand over the next few days before continuing on, first to Singapore and then to Borneo.

Let's see...I needed soap, shampoo, conditioner, aspirin, passport photos, alarm clock battery, phone time, eye drops, cashews, peanut butter, blah blah blah...restock, resupply, and then I had to eat more mango-and-sticky-rice.

Home Again to Khao San Road

Ugh, my plane out of Paro was scheduled for 7:10 a.m. in the morning. This was deliberate--I could have taken the afternoon flight. But I didn't want to hit Bangkok during the evening rush hour, so I forced myself out of bed at 5 a.m.

I hadn't slept much. I'd had a good-bye dinner with my guide, then packed until late.

I'd put off filling out the trip review form until morning, and now here I was, exhausted, late, and feeling inadequate given the lengths Tsering Penjor and Ugyen Dorji had gone to for my Bhutan individual tour. And now I had to write something brilliant that didn't involve the Shangri-La cliche and gave credit to both Ugyen for his organization and Tsering for his care and feeding.