When I was younger, I thought I knew all the answers. Issues were in black and white and before the Internet, the only way to get information about people and places was to go to a library or have your opinion fed to you by a newspaper. 

It was genuinely a different world and my  trip to Ibiza with a mate was the first time apart from school trips to Calais that I’d ever seen anywhere outside England – yes England, I’d never been further north than Peterborough or further west than Heathrow. 

A typical working class boy from an overspill council estate in Romford in other words. All bluster, swagger and bullshit, what I didn’t know could have filled countless volumes, but I was too young and uninformed to know or care. 

I started working in IT when I was eighteen and after a year or two, was making enough money to have a couple of holidays a year in the glamour spots of Ibiza and Magaluf. 

But my fixed views of other countries really didn’t change in that time, Germans stole sunbeds, the Spanish were OK but you needed to watch your back. 

And so on. 

Over time, my views changed, sometimes overnight, sometimes imperceptibly. 

And travel helped. 

I’ve been lucky with work, it’s taken me to India (5 cities and twenty visits), France, Holland, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Malaysia and Australia. 

And exotic locations like Norwich, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff and Bridgend. And hundreds of towns in the UK for trips of one day or less. 

I’d never been to Thailand before a few weeks ago, all of my holidays had either been in Europe, Canada, Australia or the Caribbean. 

And I wrote about how fantastic I found Bangkok as a city in a previous post. 

So; I’m still in Chennai and we had another bank-holiday weekend – only this time I would be alone. 

I did a bit of looking for places to go on the Internet and settled on Thailand again, this time I would stay in Phuket in a quietish resort called Karon Beach. 

It was a longer flight, with stopovers, but it all went fairly quickly and I arrived at my hotel around 10 hours after leaving the office in Chennai, hours before official check-in time and with a sense of resignation that I may have to wait a while. 

Except. 

I received a beaming smile from the clerk, a sheaf of money off leaflets and was immediately shown to a room that was considerably nicer than my £30 a night should have paid for. 

  
Once I’d unpacked (30 seconds), I had a quick wander down to the beach and the shops before going back to the pool for a crash and food session. At the bar. Obviously. 

  
In the background, you’ll see rooms that had entrance into the pool. An extra £20 a night was the extravagant cost, so I moved to the largest and most private of the bunch, the whole transaction was worked out in five minutes, again with big smiles. 

Another pleasant surprise came when two separate groups of tourists started chatting to me, making any lingering worries about finding company disappear. 

One older couple lived in Bangkok and had been there for 16 years, he used to work in an office opposite my Bangkok hotel….

Towards evening, I went for a wander into town for a beer or two and to get my bearings. 

It’s a beautiful place. 

   
  

     

And I had a couple of beers with a Filipino guitarist named Victor who was auditioning for a spot in a new bar that had just opened. 

And time passed very nicely. 

I didn’t bother with dinner that night, I went to a few more bars and then took a TukTuk to Patong to see what the nightlife looked like. 

And stayed for an hour. 

It was busy, but felt somehow like they’d tried to recreate Soi Cowboy, but just got it somehow wrong and off kilter. Maybe I was just tired from 40 hours of no sleep. 

But I had a couple more drinks in a place called Rock City, watched some live music and was back in Karon Beach less than two hours after leaving. 

   
        And had some more drinks. 

I went back to my room at some point or other; had a swim and slept the sleep of the innocent and very pissed. 

  
Saturday was a deliberately quiet day during the day, a long walk along the beach, a swim in ferocious riptides, lunch and a crash by the pool in the afternoon. Oh. I also adopted a dog for a few hours, he followed me everywhere and I had to take him back to the bar where I found him.. 

   
   Then it was a case of gearing up for the evening’s assault. 

Food was definitely needed and I found a great little restaurant that had a superb (if slightly ballad heavy) live band. Gin was on special offer and I sat and watched the world pass while eating excellent food, sipping gin and listening to music. 

I found that I’d been remembered in two bars in particular, one a quiet little place that only had space for 6 people to sit. The other was a huge place with a live band, bar girls, ladyboys, a flamboyantly gay barman and a mama-san who was larger than life in all ways possible.  

 

  
I finished the evening in the smaller bar, had a few beers with a German, took over their sound system via bluetooth and played music from my phone and left fairly late.. again. 

Then a surprising thing happened; it was one of the bar staff’s 40th birthday the next day and I was invited to share their meal. 

I blurrily accepted and went off to sleep as I’d decided to get up early and take a trip up into the hills. 

The next day, I negotiated an all-inclusive fare and set off for the Big Buddha. There were Elephant camps along the way, the photo below shows how far phones have come – filmed at burst at roughly 30 MPH. 

  
The Buddha itself didn’t disappoint, it was free to enter, is still a building site and was a genuinely peaceful place. 

   
      

I was moved by the practice of setting bells to wish people luck or to remember them, they looked stunning and sounded beautiful when the wind caught them.  

After that, it was a trip to the JungCeylon mall in Patong for a bit of lunch and wandering around. The clouds were gathering and cover seemed a good move. 

The monsoon hit around 4pm, the rain was cold and actually stung when it hit the skin. 

How do I know this?

It’s because I decided to walk to the beach. 

People looked at me strangely when I went out, but they all wanted to talk to me when I came back. 

On a length of beach that stretches for over two miles, there was just me and some mad Russian guy. 

We nodded at each other and walked into the roaring sea under cover of the torrential rain roughly two hundred metres apart. Lightning was flashing every ten seconds or so and I remember thinking that we were far apart enough not to be killed by the same bolt of lightning. 

The sea was like a warm bath after the rain and I let myself get battered around by the riptide until I was physically tired from the waves and my laughter. 

It was glorious; stupid, borderline suicidal and utterly fantastic.   

Then I went to the birthday meal. It was a very quiet affair with no booze and a lot of brilliantly prepared food. The red sauce by the fish is the spiciest thing that I’ve ever tasted that doesn’t have the word ‘psycho’ on the label. 

   
    

I stayed for a while until the bar picked up with some other customers and wandered up to the music bar where the mama-san gave me a bearhug and the first free drink of the night. 

I ended up in a mixed group comprising of some Russians, a couple of the girls from the bar, the outrageously camp barman and a ladyboy who stole my phone to take a series of selfies. 

Occasionally I was harassed by one of the tough, funny and streetwise kids who have to earn their living selling flowers. He was 12, had a patter like an old style barrow boy and was fond of showing how he could do magic tricks.   

   
    A six foot four Russian woman who looked like she wrestled bears for a living dragged me up to dance for a while. 

As did the ladyboy, who promptly jumped up and put their legs round my waist while dancing. I think I could be heard laughing six bars away. 

More of the same occurred, at one point the Russian lady’s boyfriend produced a small knife and ran it across his throat while I was dancing with her. I had no idea what the gesture meant and I laughed even louder. 

Eventually it was time to crash and I said my final goodbyes to the mama-san, who insisted on one last drink – and I received the biggest surprise of the night. 

A gift. 

Two of the girls had bought me two tiny souvenir picture frames as a souvenir. They probably cost next to nothing, but I was a bit choked up to receive them. I don’t really know why they did it, but I am very grateful. 

 

The next day I did a final beach walk, checked out, had lunch on the beach in a very strangely named place and took the taxi back to the airport. 

   
When I was younger, I had very fixed views on the world. 

It’s hard to remember what they were now to be honest, but I would probably have frowned on dancing with ladyboys. 

I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to find out otherwise .

Phuket was astonishing,  the friendliness and openness of everybody I met turned me from a fairly insular ‘not sure what to expect tourist’ into a participant. 
They’ll never see this, but I thank them all. 

SO. 

Very soon after a day of discussion about ‘should we?’  ‘What else will we do?’ What about??” The decision was made to fly to Bangkok for the Bank Holiday Weekend. Flights were booked via Air Asia and the Dream Hotel in central Bangkok was to be the place that we’d try to sleep for a few hours a night. 

I only took a small hand-luggage size suitcase, but I overpacked even so, with a pair of trousers and a long shirt (and a pair of more formal shoes) not making it into the daylight. 

We finished work early for the day, dumped our gear at the hotel, picked up our weekend luggage and left for the airport, having cunningly checked in on line and printed our boarding passes off in advance. 

Chennai customs had a short conversation about whether a piece of paper with:

• a seat number
• a barcode
• our respective names
• Air Asia in at least five separate places
• Oh.. and the words BOARDING PASS

Constituted  an actual boarding pass. 

Eventually, they agreed that we could indeed go through to security to receive a body search; as the electronic gates in a brand new airport are apparently only for show and then on to the ‘departure lounge’. 

At this point, we made an interesting discovery, you can buy Tiger Beer in individual cans at duty free. 

Apparently you’re not supposed to drink them in the airport, but it wasn’t like we could undrink them. 

And so the relaxation began. 

Approximately 30 minutes before the flight, an announcement was made asking the Thunderdog party to go to the gate. 

This is verbatim. 

‘Sir, we were worried that you would not be on the flight as you do not have boarding passes’

We duly waved our accredited pieces of paper and smiled happily, knowing that they had been stamped by Customs and Security. 

‘Yes sir, but we do not accept those passes at this airport’

More happy waving of our passes, swigging from beer cans as we continued to smile at the increasingly agitated staff. 

We were joined by somebody more senior, we knew that because he was male. 

‘Sir, as my colleague has intimated, we do not accept pre-printed boarding passes at this aiport, so would you kindly do the needful and go to the desk and get new passes?’

We stopped smiling.

‘This desk, is it back out past security?’

‘Yes sir’

‘No.’

‘Sorry sir?’

‘No, we’re not going anywhere, we have stamped boarding passes and the airline accepts them because it issued them. This isn’t our problem, we’ll be over there until we board.’

‘But sir’. 

‘You want them you go and get them.’

At which point, petty beuracracy turned to impotent anger  and our new friend left us. 

The flight was uneventful, on time and reasonably comfortable. 

I bought a local SIM card on arrival, taking a reasonable amount of Germanic sarcastic abuse for wanting to be independent of wifi networks, we took a very cheap taxi and drove to the hotel. 

Through wide streets with good infrastructure, dizzying towers and an incredible amount of scenery, the night air was vaguely tinged with flowers and the traffic moved in orderly patterns. 

It was the Anti-Chennai – just as hot, but clean, gleaming and efficient. 

And then it got interesting. 

As we neared downtown Bangkok, the streets grew busier, more bustling, all after 3am. 

Stalls lined the roads, street food and souvenirs, fried insects and T-Shirts. 

And bars. 

Roadside bars everywhere, people milling and smiling, a true melting pot of races and nationalities. 

By common agreement, we dumped our bags at the hotel and went out for ‘one beer’ before bed. I took this picture just before we bought the single, solitary beer that we were going to drink. 

  
Dear fucking god, it tasted good. 

And so, some more beer, then gin and more gin and more gin later, we arrived at our final bar for the night. and it was getting noticeably lighter. 

  
Our final bar was owned and operated by somebody straight out of central casting, she was tough and funny, drank more than her customers and insisted on plying us with shots. 

Which she matched drink for drink. 

  
There were other clients at the bar, an English bloke who may well have been on the run and a Yakuza type who broke into spontaneous dancing at around 6am. 

  The photo below was taken just before 7am, I honestly don’t know how much we drank, but only our Yakuza friend was left up. 
 

Sleep followed until 1030 and we grabbed a hurried breakfast and after a short stint at the pool, took a tuktuk to the river to pick up a ferry. 

Which of course; didn’t happen. 

After a significant amount of bartering, we eventually boarded a long tail boat and gave instructions to just take us around. 

 The driver was a surly fucker, but we had beer, camera phones and stupid grins as we toured a whole new world.   
  

This lady tried for ten minutes to sell us a whold load of crappy souvenirs before unveling her trump card. A freezer full of beer. 

It would have been impolite to refuse. 

  

But, oh god.. The scenery and the smell of barbequeing food from the small boats that sold a whole range of items to both shore and river traffic. 

  

  We left the river near the Royal Palace but were too late to get in, so wandered around for a while until it was time to think about the evening’s onslaught. 

After 15 minutes for a shower and a change, we got a taxi to a bar at the top of a tower. 

Cloud 47 is the name and it was.. wonderful. 

The jouney was a bit more eventful in that the driver didn’t know where it was – my local SIM and data now not so  amusing as Google maps did the heavy lifting for the driver, nor would it be the next day when checking German football scores became important. 

The views over the city were amazing and the staff showed the smiling helpful faces that I’d come to associate with Thai people by that point, nothing was too much trouble, everything was done with efficiency and a sense of care. 

And the view….  

  
 

After we left, we took a suicidal tuktuk back to the Soi Cowboy area and immersed ourself into the weirdness for a while. 

It’s a strange area, both seedy and amazingly alive at the same time. There are very few rules and certainly no inhibitions, some of the ladyboys are actually incredibly good looking and in the bars anyway, helpfully identified by the name of the bar or a sign stating exactly what it is. 

And sometimes they had a sense of humour too. 

  
We left there at.. I don’t know actually. 

I do know that I had another couple of gins at a roadside bar before staggering to bed after 3am. 

We’d been there for 24 hours. 

Sunday started pretty gently, I had breakfast and then went for a walk, refusing the generous offer from the hotel for a rocket fuelled breakfast and another offer from a  group of working girls? on the street. I only half heard the line that the nearest one used. It was either “I like big cock’ or ‘I have a big cock’. 

  
Bangkok reminds me a lot of the street scenes in Blade Runner, the same diversity and sound, plant growth and neon, huge screens overhead. It’s pretty cool. 

 An elevated railway runs above the streets, it’s cheap, fast and air-conditioned. 

    

  

And everywhere you walk, you catch hints of flowers and citrus. 

We did a bit of mall-time on Sunday and I was staggered by the fact that I could eat a huge lunch, with two fruit smoothies for £2. 

The food was excellent too. 

After lunch, my local SIM and Tripadvisor found us a spa and we whiled away a few hours being beaten and manipulated, stretched and pummeled by Thai masseuses. 

Don’t go there you filthy pigs, my masseuse was middle aged, heavy set and had a nasty cough, which thankfully, she kept behind a SARS mask. 

Excellent massage though, I floated out of there. 

Just in time for the next ten-minute clothes change and a taxi to Khao Sang Road and a whole new set of nightlife experiences. 

We had a quiet dinner one road back, idly watching the hippies and hordes of backpackers walk by. 

   
  It’s a pretty area and goes from being chilled to frantic in the space of a hundred metres or so. 

An upstairs bar with live music was our first and longest stop,  we had a good view of the street and the entertainment value of a group of Aussie backpackers, pissed out of their brains and lighting up (mostly female) pedestrians below with a laser pen. 

   
   It shouldn’t have been funny, but it was fucking hilarious, we obviously got involved and the biggest cheer of the night went to a Thai girl who slapped one of the Aussies and then threw her drink in his face. She REALLY wasn’t impressed with the laser. 

More bars followed. 

Quite a few. 

And we decided to get a tuktuk back to the hotel area for last drinks before crashing. 

Our driver offered us a ‘menu of services’ and THIS was the front of it.. 

  
  So that’s our code word for the weekend. 

MBBK

I may get T shirts printed. 

Monday was more sedate, we breakfasted, checked out and took a taxi to the Wat Pho temple. 

Our driver negotiated hard for his fare, and I only laughed a tiny bit when we got pulled by a traffic cop in full Judge Dredd mode who fined him for no seatbelt. 

It was double our fare. 

The temple was amazing, go see it. The pictures don’t do it justice. 

   
                   

After that, it was lunch at the biggest mall in Asia, the Siam Paragon and a train back to the hotel to get our taxi to the airport. 

We were running on fumes by now and had the misfortune (or vice versa) to meet some of our fellow passengers on the flight, a group of middle-aged Indian ‘gentlemen’ who tried en-masse to push in front of us in the queue. After some gentle remonstration, they decided to go to the back.. 

It was a reminder though of the culture of entitlement that some of the people here have and was a way of preparing us for the other side of the cultural mirror. 

The flight was on time, there were lots of empty seats and the hotel car was waiting. 

A couple of beers and some bar snacks later and the weekend was done. 

It’s hard to say just how good it was, from my point of view it was pretty special. I went with two colleagues for a weekend away and returned with two friends, a ton of stories, some fantastic memories and some new laughter lines. 

I honestly loved Bangkok, we only scratched the surface in three days despite doing our best to keep to 20 hour days or so. 

It IS the Anti-Chennai, it’s vibrant and buzzing, friendly and open, the people are all smiles, the streets are clean and smell of jasmine and honeysuckle at night. 

I’ll never forget it. 

Thanks to Jens and Lars. 

Founder members of the MBBK club with branches in Berlin, London and Chennai.