I’m just not getting Thailand. What I mean is, this is the first place I’ve visited where I felt like there were huge aspects of the culture which were hidden from me. I’ve spent plenty of time in places I could tell I was missing a lot — Nigeria comes to mind most recently — but there’s something different here.

Other places, even Nigeria, felt to me like I could grasp the bits I didn’t understand, given enough time. It might take months, or years, but I’d gradually learn the politics of the place, the local attitudes toward themselves and their neighbors and the world at large, how they conceived of themselves as a people and what they felt their place in the universe was.

Here, I haven’t been able to get that. There’s something that feels utterly alien about the place and the practices here. That’s not to say it’s unwelcoming or uncomfortable; just that I’m having difficulty managing that interpretive feat that gives you a glimpse (or the illusion) of what this must all feel like to a local.

That’s probably a good sign. There are kind of two big risks in travel. First, you can travel so shallowly as to never even scratch the local culture at all. Stay in expensive Westernized hotels. Eat in, or hit all the international fast food franchises. Spend your time lounging by the pool.¹

The other risk is overestimating how deeply you’ve managed to immerse yourself in the local culture. You can learn a lot of important but shallow details — how to tell what’s a good restaurant or how to count out change in the local currency or how to navigate the local bus system — and confuse that for meaningful insight. You mistake that steady stream of minor triumphs for the real work of understanding what are sometimes, at heart, a deeply different way of looking at the universe.²

The fact that I’m finding Thailand somewhat opaque means I’m not falling victim the second of those risks. Not entirely, anyway. I’ve been traveling a lot, and I’m always learning something I didn’t know before or getting some insight into something I didn’t fully grasp before. But that’s always tempered by an understanding of exactly how vast my ignorance remains, especially after staying somewhere for at most a couple of weeks. As usual, the first and best education you can get in any subject is just how little you actually know.

So I spent the first week here in Bangkok, and it took a long time for me to adjust, mostly because of the time change. I did get used to the city, eventually, although by then it was time to move on. So I was never fully relaxed while I was there, always up at odd hours or taking impromptu naps through most of the afternoon. I didn’t feel like I was missing a whole lot during the daytime, which was inevitably hot and humid and sunny.³ Things got better in the evening, when things were cooler⁴ and you could comfortably wander around a bit without breaking into a sweat.

And if you’ve spent any time wandering around Bangkok, you’ll pass pictures of King Maha Vajiralongkorn. Lots of them, plastered on billboards or framed in elaborate golden frames outside buildings or in public parks.⁵ Some of them are of the king and his mother, some of them are of former kings, but all of them are official portraits, generally the same few repeated almost endlessly around the city. It’s very clear who’s in charge.

Only the king isn’t in charge. Thailand has had a constitutional monarchy since 1932; the king is the nominal head of state in the same way Queen Elizabeth is in England. Thailand wavers between being a nascent democracy and being ruled by a military junta, and currently it’s in one of its “junta” phases.

But the king still occupies this kind of weird quasi-religious status that the British monarchy mostly lost a century ago. King Maha Vajiralongkorn is a living symbol of the kingdom. The current government, having overthrown a democratically elected government, needed his assent to be considered official for a lot of people.

And so that’s all reflected in those portraits. Thailand doesn’t have a huge tradition of non-devotional art, so you get something that looks an awful like their devotional art, gilded and imposing and serene. And that ties in to a long-standing tradition of lèse-majesté laws, laws intended to protect the “dignity” of the monarchy. Disparaging the royal family, or their portraits, or their pets, or (as a number of conservative Thai governments have interpreted things) criticizing anyone on the privy council. Even speaking against the lèse-majesté laws can run you afoul of the lèse-majesté laws. So maybe don’t read a lack of dissent for a lack of opposition.

I spent a lot of time in Bangkok running errands. I had a friend recommend a tailor to me, and somehow “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a suit custom-made in Thailand” turned into “Why don’t I get a tuxedo made in addition to the suit?”⁶ This is the kind of old-style place where you walk in and immediately get a drink in your hand.⁷ Within an hour I had committed to four shirts, a three-piece suit, a tuxedo with two jackets,⁸ and a tuxedo vest.

I’ve been back twice for fittings. That’s part of the appeal, come in and get another drink pressed in your hand, a little polite chit-chat, and then you go through and try on everything that’s roughed out, checking the sleeves and the cut of the jackets and the way the trousers hang. I’m back in Bangkok in about six weeks before I fly out for good, so I’ll have a final fitting, and then I’ll have another set of clothing I’ll never wear. But on the rare occasions that I do, I will look magnificent.

I also had to replace my power brick for my computer. Rather stupidly⁹ the power adapter I was using fell out of my computer bag on the flight, which I discovered as soon as I arrived at my hotel. So my first night in Bangkok involved catching a cab over to a “tech mall” to find a replacement.¹⁰

It was kind of crazy — lots of small stalls filled with all sorts of electronic bric-a-brak, like a bunch of small entrepreneurs all decided to run tiny knock-offs of Radio Shack. I eventually found someone selling Mac stuff, asked about a replacement power brick, then had to wait while they ran off somewhere in the place to locate one. But I got it.

There were also some tourist things in Bangkok. Wat Pho and the Grand Palace are the biggest things to see, and I made a point of seeing them on Sunday.¹¹ I likewise picked up a copy of Atlas Obscura and I’ve been using that to suggest more things to visit.¹² That’s how I ended up touring the Siriraj Medical Museum. Really a set of six interrelated museums, all affiliated with the hospital there and intended as teaching tools. They’re really not for the faint of heart, from the specimens of fetal abnormalities to the skulls displaying different unusual modes of death¹³ to the helpful display of sushi alongside the masses of tapeworms you could get from it. Visit after you’ve finished eating for the week.

The other suggestion I took them up on was the Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden. It’s located on the outskirts of Bangkok, and while I could have managed, somehow, on public transport I just broke down and hired a car for the day. And it was great. It’s a park outside a Buddhist temple decorated by all sorts of sculptures depicting Buddhist Hell. I suppose, like most Christian art about hell, you’re intended to meditate on your sins and resolve to avoid the fates depicted. Also like most Christian art about hell, it comes off as far more interesting than heaven does.

I’ve been trying, as I travel, to cut down the amount of time I spent flying. I had kind of assumed, somewhat naïvely, that I’d be zipping around Southeast Asia by train and bus and catamaran. That’s just not to be; 1-hour flights from city to city turn into 15-hour bus rides, which is sufficiently horrific as to be unworkable.

But I am still trying to cut back whenever possible. For this leg it meant a 9am bus ride to get to Chiang Khong from Chiang Mai. But it also meant an overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, and that I was ridiculously excited about.

There’s a grand history of railroads in Thailand,¹⁴ and sleeper cars still have a certain romance to them. It’s a romance that’s hit or miss these days — I recall a horrific overnight trip from Wrocław to Warsaw I spent trying to nap while spread-eagled over my luggage on what was not a particularly private overnight train — but Thailand rather famously upgraded a bunch of their trains a few years ago, and the rumor was the sleepers were pretty nice.

And you know, they were pretty nice. A little bare-bones, perhaps. But shortly after you leave they come by with a small menu and ask if you want dinner,¹⁵ and they’ll come back shortly with these adorable little plastic trays with a soup and a couple curries and rice and fresh fruit and a juice.¹⁶ And then a couple hours later they’ll start to come through and ask if you want the beds turned down, and when you do they’ll fold down the top compartment and lay out a thin mattress and in the space of five minutes you’ll have two freshly made bunk beds, running alongside the corridor.

Most miraculously, there was a electrical plug both above and below, so I was able to charge all my devices overnight.¹⁷ It’s not ideal; I’m still horribly paranoid about having my computer stolen so I had it jammed in beside me while I slept, and it is just a thin curtain between you and the rest of the passengers.¹⁸ You’ll also want to book in advance — the train was sold out, and when I bought tickets about a month ago there weren’t any first-class spots available, which I’d have liked to have seen. But I’ve crashed in worse digs, for more money, and those didn’t feature gently being swayed to sleep by a speeding train, even one that could use another half-inch of mattress padding.

Chiang Mai was kind of a relief after Bangkok. It’s drier and cooler, for one thing. I highly recommend traveling here in the winter months if you can swing it; I can’t even imagine what it must be like during the summer. But Chiang Mai is also set up to welcome Westerners in a way even famously hospitable Bangkok is not.

The city has always been one of the central hubs for backpackers, but recently it’s emerged as one of the hotspots of digital nomadism: cheap food and housing, reasonable climate, plentiful fast internet. That’s had a lot of local effects, most obviously in the number of coffee shops and vegan restaurants opening up.¹⁹ And, obviously, in the number of Westerners wandering around.²⁰

That makes it feel less authentic (whatever that means) but also less alienating. It’s a relief to be able to walk into restaurants and find vegetarian pad thai. I had a great time just knocking around the city, visiting the temples and the flower festival,²¹ shopping the Night Bazaar and relaxing in a bar just watching the street traffic. But I wouldn’t spend more than a day or two; it’s the sort of place you either want to use as a base to visit zip line adventure day trips or multi-day jungle treks past temples and waterfalls or elephant rehabilitation camps²² or, instead, to book in for a three-month stay and just do nothing. And I’m not ready to do nothing for that long.

I did want to mention something about how I’ve been eating. The food in Thailand has been almost universally fantastic. That’s provided I can figure out whether I can eat it or not, which is often a dicey proposition. First, the good: I have yet to have eaten a bad Thai meal here.²³ Most restaurants are open-air and often just a step above hole-in-the-wall status. I went to a “vegetarian” restaurant in Bangkok²⁴ and had a green curry with tempeh²⁵ which I’m still thinking about weeks later. The best places, though, are the street vendors. You can’t walk two minutes without passing someone who’s set up a folding table and is grilling skewers of meats or frying dumplings or noodles or handing out bowls of rich, clear broths filled with I’ve no idea what kind of bits and bobs except to say it all smells absolutely amazing and costs next to nothing.

But the bad: most of it isn’t vegetarian, and the language barrier and cultural difficulties in communication²⁶ means basically I can’t eat the vast majority of it. You’d think a place which lists a dozen types of curry, all with “beef, chicken, or shrimp” options, would add a “tofu” option as well, but they don’t. Instead you’ll generally get, at the end of the menu, two or three options of the “tofu with string beans” variety.

It’s baffling, since Thai restaurants in the United States are generally fantastic for vegetarians. And for a country with as rich a Buddhist tradition as Thailand, I’d have thought it’d be accommodating. But chalk it up to another surprising cultural difference. As I said, all the food I’ve managed to find has been amazing, and it beats scrounging around a menu in, say, Prague only to settle for another dinner of fried cheese.

I did splurge once in Bangkok, wandering over to Nahm for a tasting menu. Bangkok has, like most large cities, an upper strata of bars and hotels and clubs and shops which cater to a global audience. These generally have about as much soul and connection to the local community as a TGI Fridays. But Nahm has a Michelin star, and one of their menus was entirely vegetarian, so I decided to check it out.

Turns out I had kind of misunderstood the menu — there wasn’t a choice from two appetizers, then from two starters, then from five entrées. You got one of everything. And I’ll be honest, it was kind of great. It involved a lot of traditional dishes updated with different presentations or different spices or different preparations. It wasn’t fusion cuisine. But it pulled from a much larger range of styles and tastes than most Thai restaurants do. I really didn’t like two or three of the dishes, but I’m so glad I got a chance to try them. It’s so rare you encounter something that’s so different from what you’re expecting. And there was so much food, and so much of it was great, I’ll take the occasional miss.

I’m now on a bus to Chiang Khong, on the Laos border, where I’m due to catch a longboat to Luang Prabang in the morning. I’ll be back for a more touristy route through Thailand in about six weeks; I’ve booked a series of stays on various beach resorts in the south to try and relax a bit after all the whirlwind travel. Thailand’s great for tourism, friendly and charming and inviting.

The great shadow over this entire jaunt in Southeast Asia is naturally the Coronavirus.²⁷ I’ve had a vague cough since I was in Oslo²⁸ and it’s really hard to tell if you’re running a fever if you’ve got a low key sunburn all the time. I was taking heart in my lack of a sniffle until I read that the Coronavirus generally doesn’t come with a runny nose. Am I tired because I walked around for four hours in the heat of the noonday sun, then stayed up until 3am because of jetlag? No, that’s probably fatigue from the flu.

So while I mostly struggle with hypochondria, the rest of the country is quietly flipping out. There’s been a relatively small number of cases in Thailand overall, but it’s hard to ignore the sheer number of people wandering around with surgical masks.²⁹ I think I’m safe, meaning something like “the risk of catching it is low and even if I did the risk of it being anything worse than a midlevel flu is also really low.”

But it’s weird seeing a country so dependent on tourism trying to thread the needle between the kind of irrational panic the media wants (like the United States is undergoing) and the kind of happy, nothing-to-see-here, everything-is-under-control message that reassures the foreigners. In a rather delightful example of this, the health minister just a few days ago freaked out on national television over the number of tourists who refused the free masks he was handing out.³⁰ He’s already apologized.

The thing is, I kind of like that Thailand better than the one that gets shown to tourists. That’s the one that’s slightly world-weary, that managed to avoid colonial rule through canny sacrifices, that’s a bit more comfortable being forthright. I hope I get the chance to see more of that.

Next: Vientiane (VTE) to Hanoi (HAN)
Prev: Oslo (OSL) to Bangkok (BKK)

Footnotes

¹ I should make clear, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. Sometimes you just need to drop out and relax.

² Of course, these two risks aren’t mutually exclusive, leading to that delightful person you’ll run into occasionally who will go on and on about what a wonderfully relaxed and spiritual and friendly culture you’ll find in <insert country here> based primarily on the interactions they had with bartenders and pool attendants.

³ The big exception here was Wat Pho and other tourist sites like that, which have an annoying habit of closing around 3:30 in the afternoon, pretty much necessitating you get there either really early or when the sun is at its worst.

⁴ Although still pretty warm, truth be told

⁵ Amusingly, the billboards will often feature similar frames photoshopped around the portraits; it seems to be kind of a package deal.

⁶ I’ve discovered, as a guy, there are three things you can wear which will cover 90% of the non-fantasy larps you get invited to: a modern suit, a 1930s-style suit, and a tuxedo.

⁷ It’s a little jarring to be sipping a gin and tonic while a small platoon of assistants run a tape measure up and around and over every inch of you, all while amiably chatting with the proprietor about suit styles and shirt options.

⁸ One modern (which for tuxedos covers about the last century of male fashion) and one with tails (which covers back through Victorian times)

⁹ I assume; I mean I lost it, so I can only speculate on how that happened.

¹⁰ And then, two days later, to find a replacement for the replacement, since while it promised 65W of power I was only pulling 12W, which is roughly a standard phone charge. You can, in fact, charge a MacBook from a phone charger, but it will take forever.

¹¹ Actually, I made a point of seeing them on Saturday, but after getting breakfast then heading back to my room to finish sleeping and getting up and puttering around for a bit I discovered they had already closed. So I made a point of seeing them on Sunday, and planned that whole thing out a bit better.

¹² Similar to how I’ve been using 1,000 Things To See Before You Die. It’s interesting comparing the two; they’re obviously aimed at completely different audiences and serve different purposes.

1,000 Things To See Before You Die is clearly aimed at vacationers, and rich ones at that. It’ll drop a suggestion to spend $10,000 on a five-day cruise as casually as it drops a suggestion to wander around the free street markets. It’s not all like that, and I can laugh at some of the more outré suggestions; I still don’t feel the urge to pick up golfing, no matter how nice St. Andrews might be.

Atlas Obscura is batshit crazy in a completely different way. I guess I’d call its target demographic “aspiring adventurers.” None of the stuff seems all that expensive on the face of it, at least if you don’t consider the inherent costs of going and seeing them. But some of the weirder stuff requires charting private planes to get to, and some of it requires getting special permission from various government agencies, so actually visiting them requires a level of investment that’s at least as onerous as dropping $10,000 on a cruise.

Which makes both these books more aspirational than practical. So I’m probably using both of them the wrong way.

¹³ The label will say “Man dragged 40 feet by car” and you’ll see a skull scraped down to a flat plane and think “Why yes, that does look like I’d have imagined.”

¹⁴ One of the thoughts I had for this trip was to take the E&O railroad from Singapore, but I looked at the prices and all I can say is if your travel budget is 10× mine I have what look to be some fantastic travel suggestions. Maybe someday.

¹⁵ There’s an extra charge, but it’s not especially out-of-line with what you’d pay in town.

¹⁶ They’re all premade, mind you. But still pretty fresh and pretty tasty.

¹⁷ Even better, I was able to use all my devices without worrying I would run out of charge by the morning.

¹⁸ And any flu-like pandemics they might be carrying

¹⁹ There’s more vegan restaurants than, say, in Zagreb.

²⁰ Maybe I’m the only one who cares here, but man do I have a personal aversion to all the guys wandering around Southeast Asia wearing pajama pants and topknots like it’s a uniform. The guy sitting across from me on the night train, who looked to be almost all of 19 and I’m sure would have been perfectly charming if I struck up a conversation, was literally reading The 4-Hour Work Week and the whole thing made me want to book a ticket straight back to Bangkok.

²¹ I had noticed, scheduled my trip around, and promptly forgot that Chiang Mai has an annual flower festival the weekend I was visiting. I watched the parade, including the high school brass band playing Meet the Flintstones (accompanied by matching costumes), and then got to wander around the park with thousands of tulips and orchids and other floral arrangements.

²² One nice sign of how things have changed is that most of the elephant camps seem to have switched over to eco-friendly rehabilitation parks, where you’re expected to wash and feed the elephants. One trip I saw was actually prominently advertising the fact that you couldn’t ride the elephants there, like that was a selling point. Which, honestly, it kind of is.

²³ For a change of pace I went to a bar reputed to have great pizza, and I regretted it.

²⁴ As far as I could tell, “vegetarian” mostly means they’ll have a regular menu, but also a couple pages of vegetarian choices.

²⁵ Which I’ve never seen as an option in a Thai restaurant in the United States, where it’s invariably tofu or bust.

²⁶ I have enough trouble asking native English speakers in restaurants about whether there’s fish paste in the curry or chicken stock in the broth.

²⁷ While I’m relieved it’s no longer just “Coronavirus” — there’s lots of different coronavirii, people! — I’m not at all thrilled with the racism inherent in naming it after Wuhan. I know there’s a tradition at naming diseases over where they first appeared, but that’s a tradition very spottily applied. It’s not “British Mad Cow Disease.”

²⁸ There is no better way to ensure you need to cough than put yourself in some situation, say the line for immigration at an overcrowded and paranoid airport, where you absolutely should not cough.

²⁹ I’ve no idea what’s a normal number, so I can’t say for certain there’s a marked increase.

³⁰ The word he used was farang which is a vaguely insulting word meaning “white foreigner.” Fun etymological fact: it derives from “Frank,” which I guess makes it a French loanword.