Gold on Gray
2 days in Bangkok
Bangkok is one of the most interesting metropolises in Southeast Asia. It is home to about 10 of the country's 63 million people, and it lives differently from the rest of Thailand.
Bangkok's contrasts are especially noticeable in architecture: while our cities are mostly nine-story, in Bangkok 20-40-story high-rises, like trees above grass, rise above two-to-four-story houses. A five-star hotel is often surrounded by utterly one-story shanties. Bangkok's air is hot and spicy, like tom yam soup. It is also rich in exhaust fumes, but hotter, and seasoned with the vapors of meat dishes being fried and boiled on the roadsides.
You can get around the city by taxi, which is cheap, by tuk-tuks, which are even cheaper, but vulnerable to smog, and by Skytrain. Skytrain is a metro, only not underground but elevated, unusually civilized.
No matter how much you paint and glaze, the main color of any modern city remains the gray of concrete and trampled asphalt. But Bangkok is remembered by many as a "golden city" or, at least, a city of gold on gray - so much gold, even without entering jewelry stores, remains in the eyes after visiting the Grand Palace.
By the Grand Palace one usually means something consisting of the royal palace itself, where only high-ranking officials are admitted among guests, and a large temple complex, where everyone is admitted for a fee. The temple buildings, covered with gold and multicolored glass mosaics, scorch your pupils so intensely in the bright sun that the optimal dose of visual impressions is quickly absorbed.
Bangkok is the only place in the country where you can see real Thai boxing (muay Thai). According to the rules of this martial art, people pound each other with fists protected by gloves and completely unprotected elbows and knees, which are precisely considered the body parts capable of inflicting the most devastating damage. Fights are held several days a week at Lumpini and Ratchadamnoen stadiums, in the evenings. More expensive seats are right at the ring, the cheapest are in the gallery, behind a metal mesh. If you come at the beginning, you can see novice masters. With each fight, professionalism and the amount of blood spilled on the ring floor increase.
Chao Phraya, which cuts a swath through the city, is truly a yellow river.
Bangkok was once called the Venice of Asia. But if sailing through the canals of Venice amazes with the number of palaces seen, then along the banks of Bangkok's canals high-rise hotels alternate with shacks, and there are more shacks. To witness this spectacle, which is also stunning in its own way, you can take a water taxi, which departs from the Tha Maharat and Tha Tien piers every half hour. Or you can go free sailing by renting a boat at the Tha Chang, Tha Saphaan Phut, or Tha Si Rgaua piers. This way you can reach the colorful floating market on the Bangkok Noi canal, which is open from 5:00 to 11:00 and from 14:00 to 17:00.
Late in the evening, all roads lead to the areas of Patpong Street (Saladeng Skytrain station) and Soi Cowboy alley. Foreigners gather here to jostle through the market, choosing souvenirs or cheap clothes, have a shish kebab or frog at a small restaurant, get a Thai massage, or perhaps follow the inviting glow of red lanterns. You should not come here with children: here people sell themselves.
Ultramarine
6 days in Pattaya
Although Pattaya is a seaside resort, you shouldn't go there just to sunbathe and swim in the sea. As our Thai guide said: "The sea here is not very clean, but that's okay - Thais swim everywhere." Half an hour's speedboat ride from Pattaya there is a coral island, where the sea is cleaner. But if you really want to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the Bounty chocolate bar advertisement, you'll have to sail to the quiet island of Samet, which is a national park. One of the Thai names of the island translates as "island with sand like crushed crystal." (To get to Samet, you need to drive 70 km to the town of Ban Phe, then take a half-hour ferry to the island.)
Some difficulties with quality bathing are amply compensated by the accessibility and wide variety of excursions, all of which are interesting for children.
Here is an incomplete "menu" of just one crocodile farm: petrified trees, pig races, pig swimming, pig arithmetic, crocodile births, tiger show, photo with an elephant, photo with an elephant calf.
In Mini-Siam Park there are reduced copies of famous architectural structures. At the entrance, guests are "welcomed" by the naked muscular torso of a Russian soldier with an anti-tank grenade in his hand - a copy of the monument to the Battle of Stalingrad.
At an elephant farm you can learn what man's longtime charges - elephants - are capable of, at a cobra farm see how quickly a cobra attacks, at a tiger farm have your photo taken with a tiger cub, at a monkey training center see a parody of yourself. The most picturesque place where you'll want to linger longer is the Nong Nooch Tropical Garden, 18 km from Pattaya. In Nong Nooch, too, there are very skillful elephants - they are even able to massage a person with their feet; there are also national dances, a butterfly garden, but the most impressive thing is the surreal landscapes with trees and bushes whose crowns are trimmed into geometrically regular shapes.
A peculiar spectacle is the transvestite shows "Alcazar" and "Tiffany". Creeping smoke, bright lights, and in the midst of all this, creatures who were born male and now glow with delight that everyone takes them for women stroll in bright dresses to the music.
In the evening, the most active tourists, who came without children, gather on Walking Street — an exact analogue of Bangkok's Patpong. Touts for sex shows pester the strollers with the event program on a piece of paper. If in English this program looks relatively decent (“1 pussy... 2 pussy...” and even immediately “4 pussy...”), then in Russian, thanks to the efforts of an unknown Russian translator, it is different: “1 willy... 2 willies... 4 willies...”.
Emerald
5 days in Kanchanaburi
Kanchanaburi is a national park in the jungle 150 km northwest of Bangkok. The bridge over the River Kwai attracts many tourists who have seen the eponymous film, shot in 1957 and winning seven Oscars. True, the current bridge is no longer wooden but stone, and, judging by some of the guide's reservations, not exactly in the place where the Americans and Britons captured by the Japanese built it while laying a railway from Thailand to Burma. Tens of thousands of prisoners then died of tropical diseases.
The bridge, the cemetery, the precious stone market, and the historical museum in the city of Kanchanaburi are but a one-day episode of our vacation. The vacation itself will take place on this same pristine River Kwai. On its banks and even above the water on stilts, many hotels have been built, most often in the form of bungalows.
The hotels are quite cut off from civilization: you even have to get there on a long motorboat with a high upturned bow. From the jungle, on the contrary, almost nothing separates the hotels. The staff are residents of the surrounding wild villages. In the evenings, they also perform songs and dances in the national style — not as deftly as in more civilized places, but with all their heart.
Visiting villages lost in the jungle is one of the more curious points of the program. There is also rafting on rafts, elephant riding, and treks to the Sai Yok Yai and Sai Yok Noi waterfalls and other attractions created by nature itself. They say there are no crocodiles in the River Kwai, although many tourists have seen them in fright. Nevertheless, you need to swim while holding on to something: the current is so fast that you won't even notice how you end up in Burma; and there the tourism industry is less developed.
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