It takes five taxis before one claims to know where the Nikon Center is on Silom Road, half way across the city of Bangkok. I get into one cab only to exit a few feet away as the driver shakes his head, “Oh no madame, can not find.” Unlike the Nepalese cabbies who would tell you anything to get you into the car, the Thai taxi can't make enough fare going far out into the business boonies during rush hour traffic. I hail consecutive taxis until coolly offering the fifth one $300 baht. Miraculously, the hack knows where I need to go.
“Are you sure you know how to get there?” I question the nodding driver. It was imperative to drop off the Nikon for repair so I could have one last day to capture the spirit of the city without the black blobs of yak and goat hair on the camera sensor – the interior depths swiped clean of spilled dal bhat, Coke and jungle grime of Nepal.
The cab speeds off into the thick of the slow moving traffic, getting denser by the minute, the driver sighing proportionately louder as we become more entrenched in the jam and bottlenecks. We seem to be driving a long time before he decides to call someone for directions. He's on the radio, he's on the cell, he's shifting gears and speeding four times faster through lines of cars, weaving in and out like he's playing a video game, all the while sighing more emphatically.
“I thought you said you knew where this was...” I lean forward to verify.
“Much traffic, madame.” Sure traffic... and that universal stereotypical male refusal to ask directions perhaps... which is now cutting into his once large profit. All taxis have the dashboard Buddha enshrined in flowers with the King of Thailand hanging from the mirror – ours is dancing a wild jig as non existent spaces between cars open to his erratic honking and bullying. He screeches to a halt in front of 161 Silom Road, “Nikon, madame.”
The Nikon people are helpful and friendly in the well stocked store.
“Your camera very, very dirty,” the techie scolds and condemns it into quarantine until scrubbed and fitted with a new pop up flash, burnt out by overuse. “It cost you 4,500 baht, ok?” she looks concerned. I do the math: about $145 U.S.
I smile, “No problem, madame,” knowing it would be close to $500 in the states and take about three weeks.
“You come back tomorrow after 4 p.m.,” she instructs me. Delighted, I walk out into the hot Bangkok afternoon and celebrate with green mango slices served in a bag and sprinkled with a chili-sugar fish sauce washed down with a perfect Thai iced tea full of sweet goodness and caffeine. It is heightened by traditional Thai instrumental muzak piped from a speaker – but it sounds weird. I realize it's a rendition of John Denver's “Country Road” that's being plucked by Asian strings, lost in some strange Thai translation.
Every afternoon fierce thunderstorms rattle the city, booming from buildings, lightning flashing uncomfortably close. It's a good time to get off the streets and into a spa. I slip into a salon for a manicure, pedicure and just for fun have them slap bleach on my head, which after four weeks resembles an inverted skunk. The salons love to place patrons in the front window so everyone can see how busy they are, hoping that it will draw more clients. Passersby stop and stare at my ridiculous position as four stylists hover around me – each foot balanced in a separate bowl of lemon water, fingernails being filed and hair tugged straight up at the scalp and painted with white fuzzy lotion. I wave to the gawking strangers in my best parade mode. Primped and primed my hair glows in the night and my toes twinkle in metallic pink.
When the appointed time comes to pick up the camera at 4 p.m., I go through the same dance trying to hail a cab until one accepts the magic offer of 300 baht. It's traffic as usual but the store closes at 5:30 – an entire hour and thirty minutes to get to the half hour destination. We drive for forty-five minutes before I ask, “You DO know where Silom Road is, don't you?” He doesn't answer. “The shop closes at 5:30. If you don't know, you should call for directions,” I suggest. He pulls over and pays a woman to use her cell phone since his is out of minutes, and then speeds off.
“How far?” I ask.
“About twenty-minutes,” he answers nonchalantly.
“But the store will be closed by then!” I panic, needing my camera for the last day excursions – the Palace, wats, longboats on the river, canals, people, places. He speeds up but it's ten minutes after closing time when we arrive. They are just pulling down the store's large metal gates as I bolt up the steps pleading. I writhe under the iron gates like an action adventure figure.
Night changes the face of Khao San Road as the vampires emerge on the scene selling everything from university diplomas to large buckets of “Very Strong Drink Cheap” according to the hand printed signs the bevy of bar touts are waving.
“You want to see ping pong show?” one carnival barker asks me.
“Ping pong?” I ask, wondering why anyone would want to leave the vibrant street scene to go watch a game.
“Er... no,” a friend pulls me away by the arm, “You don't want to know what the showgirls do with those ping pong balls...”
“So, not a tournament...” my naivete blushes.
I have dinner just off the chaos of Khao San – green curry, tamarind soup and fresh coconut juice served in the shell – and enjoying a tasty meal when a rat scuttles across my feet and into a drain close by. I like rats, but not with my main course. I've never had a bad meal in Thailand, I think silently so as not to tempt the bacteria gods.
My last day in Thailand is a list of must see places with a like-new Nikon. The morning is sunny and warming up – but I am feeling sluggish and suspiciously grumbly when I realize it's my stomach doing the grinding. Downing a couple of antacids I head over to the first temple where a ceremony of chanting is taking place, the monks' harmonious voices lifting into the rafters and beyond. Pro videographers are filming as the elder monk shakes water onto the crowd with a wooden whisk broom. Young monks in saffron robes are being fed in the wings. Entwined with sweet incense, the mantra doesn't sooth my abdomen which is turning inside out. I head down to the docks anyway.
It is then that the full, frustrating reality forces a return to the hotel, where I spend the rest of the afternoon and night in the sleepless torment of the dreaded Bangkok Belly until the taxi takes me to the airport at 5 a.m. for the thirty hour journey back to Denver. No long boats or palace, no last massage and certainly no more green curry.
I arrange myself into the more spacious seat of Japan Airlines, fortunately next to the restrooms, draped in blankets. The two-story jet smoothly glides down the runway into a perfect ascent way up above Bangkok skies heading north seven hours to Tokyo, where another jet will take me to Chicago in a fourteen hour cruise over ice and frigid sea before boarding a final plane for Denver. A shuttle bus will then schlep the one and one half hours to Ft. Collins to pick up my car and drive six hours to Crested Butte where I'll sink into my own cushy bed looking out on dark skies that contrast a bizillion stars strewn across the Milky Way. And sleep until my spirit figures out where my body is. There's no place like home...
