Mistakes, missteps, misanthropy

Time Period: 25-28th July 2019

Just before we went travelling, my girlfriend’s auntie got us the most fantastic gift – a personalised scrapbook. It’s made from recycled paper, is tied with a black ribbon, and best of all, it has the words “The Adventures of Alice and Mark” on the front.

When you think about what an adventure is, you probably think of going on a journey, seeing incredible sights, doing things for the first time, or being far from home. Adventures are supposed to be fun, exciting, fast-paced.

It’s easy to forget that adventures also usually include a lot of things going wrong. It’s tempting to think that bad things won’t happen to you on your adventure. Bad luck is just a matter of perception, right?

The day we got off the plane, we were accosted by a smartly dressed train driver. Without asking for anything in return, he told us what kind of tuk tuk prices to negotiate, which SIM card to buy and recommended us to visit a nearby travel agency to book a day trip before the school holidays started.

Having negotiated a tuk tuk, we were delighted to immerse ourselves in the sights, sounds and fragrances of Bangkok as the open air blasted our faces and our driver revved his engine like a 60’s greaser.

When we got to the hostel, we found out we were right next to Khao San Road. We were surrounded by bars, restaurants, street food stands, shops and market stalls. Everything we needed, right on our doorstep (literally, in fact – there was a bar attached to the hostel and a noodle stand just outside).

When we went on our day trip (to Ayutthaya), we were really pleased to be driven between six different temples in one day, with a guide to explain the history, and lunch provided. We didn’t have to lift a finger.

So far, so good. Not just good, but great. Maybe even wonderful. You get the picture.

But for every silver lining, there is a dark and dirty cloud waiting to soak you to your underwear.

As it turned out, the travel agency charged us three times the price of all the other people who took the tour. We had accepted the agency’s price without negotiating at all, and didn’t compare prices beforehand (at the time, we had no Thai SIM card and no internet). Rookie errors, especially for someone who used to negotiate contracts professionally.

Despite knowing roughly what price to pay for a tuk tuk, we still didn’t know that in Bangkok at least, metered taxis are far cheaper, and you don’t even have to negotiate the price. We even found out from a friend later on, that tuk tuks are notorious for taking you to places you don’t want to go. If the driver’s family owns a certain restaurant, they’ll often tell you that the restaurant you ask to go to is closed and take you to their family’s instead. But before we found that out, a tuk tuk driver managed to drop us off at the wrong night market – right in the centre of red light district that makes Amsterdam look like a PG rated romcom.

When it came to the hostel, we were so close to the well-oiled, razor-sharp tourist bear-trap that is Khao San Road, that the music kept us awake til 3am and the shouty youths next door even later. At 4am, I was so incensed that I hammered on their door, shouting like a madman and rattling their doorknob (they must have been scared out of their minds). After that, they were as quiet as mice, but the adrenaline rush kept me up for the next 2 hours. I got up at 6am for a 7am tour having had literally no sleep at all.

In Ayutthaya, it was all our fault – having not needed to think all day, we forgot to memorise the route back to the minibus at the final temple. We ran around confused in searing heat for 30 minutes, making phone calls to our confused minibus driver. We almost got left behind.

Three days after arriving, we had spent double our budget, were exhausted from lack of sleep, and were miserable from the constant bartering. Outside our hostel, we couldn’t walk five metres without being offered scorpions on a stick, tailored suits, bracelets stitched with filthy messages* or ‘Ping Pong’ shows**. I could feel Bangkok’s tourist-hungry maw sinking its toxic fangs deeper and deeper into my naïve heart.

The maxim is this: with every adventure comes misadventure. And once I understood that, I suddenly realised what an adventure really is. An adventure isn’t just a one-way ticket to having a good time. It’s an opportunity to make mistakes and missteps – and to learn from them.

Here are a list of 4 pieces of advice I wrote down for myself at 5am in my hostel room, when I couldn’t sleep:

1. Find out the noise level of the area before you book a hostel
2. Compare prices before booking anything
3. Always take special care to remember the route back to your meeting point
4. Be VERY clear about where you want to go in a taxi or tuk tuk, and check you’re following the correct route along the way.

The trick is to try to not become disillusioned along the way. We admitted to ourselves that we should have found out what was on Khao San Road before we stayed anywhere near there. We had a serious discussion and agreed (very quickly!) that we needed to move hostel. We booked a hotel outside central Bangkok with a pool, for pretty much the same price as our hostel – and went there in a taxi, not a tuk tuk. The next day, we told our hostel owner about our experience and he was kind enough to refund us one night of charges.

Today, we went for a swim in the hotel pool, and walked along a road populated by locals who instead of trying to hawk us goods, eyed us suspiciously and turned away from us when we looked at them, apparently not keen to interact with tourists (and I can see why – we’re a high maintenance bunch). We got our laundry done by a cheerful man who didn’t speak a word of English, but whose enthusiastic gesticulations got across that we could return his hangers the next morning. We paid 106 baht for a meal that would usually cost triple that on Khao San Road.

In short, we saw an area of Bangkok that wasn’t fuelled by drunk, party-mad tourists and preyed on by avaricious Bang-cockneys***. I suspect these kinds of areas are in the majority, not the minority, here – you just need to find them.

Tomorrow, we fly to Chiang Mai – essentially the capital of northern Thailand. With what we’ve learned, we’re far better equipped to deal with the problems we’ve already encountered. I just can’t wait to see what mistake we make next – and what we might learn from it.

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*Note: DO NOT read this footnote if you are easily offended, or a member of my family. The filthy messages stitched onto bracelets include: “I Love Ginger P***y”, “I Love Jew D**k”, “I Love Lady Boy”, “Up Bum No Baby”, “I Love Black C**t”, “Eat A D**k C**t”, “I Love Donkey P***y”, “F**k My Off” and other equally nonsensical and/or outrageous phrases.

** Note: DO NOT read this footnote if you are easily offended, or a member of my family. “Ping Pong” shows are essentially where a crowd of people pay to watch a woman shoot a ping pong ball out of her vagina, at high enough velocity to hit the faces of the people in the front row. I’ve heard that the pièce de résistance is said woman producing a rabbit out of a hat, except that the rabbit is a canary and the hat is once again her vagina – but fortunately, I can’t testify to that myself.

*** Bangcockneys: my new word for wheeler-dealer tuk tuk drivers and cut-throat salespeople living in Bangkok. I’m very proud of it, so don’t you dare tell me that someone else came up with it before me.