Bangkok is a stunning city of about eleven million people – with almost as many visitors on top of that.  It is a Buddhist city in a country that has welcomed foreigners for hundreds of years, but a country that has never endured foreign occupation. It is a city where you can eat at street stalls or at five-star hotels or at Michelin-rated restaurants.  It is a city where you can visit temples, palaces markets and where you can watch superbly muscled athletes battling it out in a Muay Thai boxing ring, or superbly proportioned dancers performing in a trans-gender cabaret.

On my recent visit, it was also a place where it was impossible to ignore the huge number of cannabis shops selling – legally – all sorts of naughty weeds for “therapeutic” or “medicinal” purposes.

Punch Kick Gouge

Several years ago, I went with Thai friends to a Muay Thai boxing event.  My host took me “backstage” after watching several bouts and we found young men being massaged before they entered the ring and where bloodied combatants were being bandaged up after leaving the ring.

I am not a man who enjoys seeing other men bashing each other’s heads and drawing blood and causing concussion.  The Marquess of Queensbury be damned:  boxing is a brutal sport and really should be banned.

But Muay Thai is an almost balletic art form – art with blood, perhaps.  UK artist Damien Hurst could perhaps embalm a Thai boxer or two in his rather-perverted quest to be a confrontational “artist”.

At the Rajadamnern boxing stadium tickets for the almost nightly spectacle cost THB 1800 (about US$52.00) or up to THB 2500 (US$72.00) for a ringside seat to enjoy the close-up spectacle of boxers (see featured image, LEFT) going through the elaborate and enchanting pre-bout routines of stretches, prayers and offerings of thanks to trainers and to various martial gods … before getting to the very gritty end of things … where elbows, fists, knees, feet and just about any part of the body other than the teeth can be used to combat an opponent.

It is brutal – yes – but it is beautiful, too, and even to a non-pugilistic spectator, it seems to have an elegance and a charisma missing from standard boxing matches or from Mixed Martial Arts bouts, in both of which the sole aim seems to be to inflict the maximum damage on the other human being.  Perhaps Muay Thai boxers are also hoping to do this – and they probably are – but – and there it is – there is a “but” …

There are lots of lots of girls

I would like to be beside

Beside the seaside, beside the sea …

A long way – geographically and stylistically – from the Rajadamnern stadium is Asiatique The Riverfront, just a short ferry-ride along the lovely Chao Phrayo River from the Sathorn pier under the Thaksin Bridge. 

During my visit to Bangkok, the Asiatique was featuring a sort of mini-Disneyland, with free and ticketed events and displays – none of which really caught my attention as I was headed for the delights of the Calypso Cabaret, featuring long-legged dancers and loads of feather-decked beautiful women with bodies almost as striking as those at Rajadamnern …

The cabaret costs about US$40.00 for a seat in the tiered auditorium, with a welcome G&T or other drink included, for a jolly show of dance and lip-synch singing. The Calypso website states, rather mysteriously, that they:

• constantly strip down decorations and costumes to the bare necessities and minimize choreographic ambitions and create choreographies, which highlight the specific talents and abilities of our actors and actresses. The overload and without any doubt the overkill of today’s frenzies of the media world are verifying our concept of reduction.

I am not quite sure what the management is trying to say … but perhaps the website of the Cockatoo (!) Ladyboy Bar in Soi Cowboy says it more clearly:

• Ladyboys are really beautiful, much prettier than ladies in other bars

There is no doubt that the performers at Calypso Cabaret are pretty, with their long long long legs and great bodies … but they are all men … or men who are entering the challenging journey to cease being men … or men who enjoy celebrating their feminine side … but whoever they are or wish to be, the show is huge fun and massively entertaining. Marilyn never looked so good …

Thailand is a country where sexual mores are seldom questioned and people at all points along the LGBTQIA+ spectrum are usually made to feel welcome.  A few days after I left Bangkok, the city celebrated Gay Pride Week with an elaborate parade through downtown streets and hundreds of multi-coloured flags decorating city shopping malls.

Eating

A visitor to Bangkok can certainly eat deep-fried cockroaches or scorpions in street markets, but why would you?  Street food in Bangkok is excellent and there are numerous foodie tours that offer visitors a chance to try traditional Thai and Asian food, as well as a chance to cook some of them as well.

There are many superb restaurants in the city’s five-star hotels. 

At Lebua State Tower’s Mezzaluna restaurant on the 65^th floor, guests can enjoy great food and wonderful views of the City of Angels.  I confess, however, that on my last stay in this marvellous hotel I enjoyed the sky-line drinks … but later suffered from food poisoning following a nasty buffet lunch at the Queen Sirikit Convention Centre, where I had been a guest at an education convention.

Way way down below, at ground level, and a long way from the nasty night at Lebua, I really enjoyed re-visiting the delightful Italian restaurant Amici in the Siam Paragon shopping mall, where I had my favourite of rock lobster, mushrooms and rocket salad.   Siam Paragon offers many dining opportunities in its huge food court and in its many restaurants including the 80⁰ Below eatery inside the gourmet supermarket, where I had some great salmon tartare – a dish I repeated a few nights later in my room at the Anantara Siam, formerly the Four Seasons, and probably my favourite hotel in Bangkok.

Unlike most towering five-star hotels in Bangkok, the Anantara is a luxurious low-rise place of just five or six storeys, with one of the best swimming pools in Bangkok, located a few minutes’ stroll from the Rajadamri Skytrain station, and overlooking the Royal Bangkok Sports Club.

The RBSC still fills me with horror as I recall the scene of an ignominious defeat several years ago where my host took me to play golf … and where I lost thirteen balls into the many water hazards.

My host was ever-gracious … but became just a little tight-lipped as our round continued, with the caddies (we each had four caddies) guffawing as I sank yet another ball into yet another pond

• Oh – that’s OK Chris – here is a new ball …
• Oh – that’s OK Chris – here is a new ball …
• Oh – that’s OK Chris – here is a new ball …

Golf is one thing … food is quite another … and over the road from the RBSC is my hotel … where afternoon tea is being served …

If you enjoy an afternoon delight (and isn’t there a 1970s song with that title?) join me at the Anantara for their yummo spread served beneath the superb hand-painted silk-covered ceilings in a grand lobby that was created in the 1970s to rival the hotel’s sister property, Hong Kong’s Peninsular Hotel.

Ice Magic

The nightly turn-down service at the Anantara does not include a mint chocolate on the pillow … but it does include a topping-up of the ice bucket in the mini-bar. 

Continuing the chilly theme, I found that ICE Magic, a local pop-up attraction, was just up the road from my hotel.  If you hurry, you can go downhill skiing in Bangkok … but if you go after the middle of July 2023 you will find nothing but a car park at the rear of a city market.

Entry to the ICE attraction is pretty expensive – about THB 1000 for adults (and about THB 650 for Seniors) – but the entry price includes a warm winter jacket and snow boots to cope with the -15⁰ C inside.  Visitors push through insulated doors (outside in Bangkok it was 35⁰ C) and find about 3000 square metres of snow and ice that have been carved into snow mountains, glistening translucent  azure iced igloos, a snowboarding zone complete with well-wrapped instructors and arctic sculptures said to be inspired by winning ice artists from the Harbin Ice Festival.

I slipped and glided and slid here and there … but did not jump onto a rubberised doughnut to go sliding down the lovely slopes … and did not throw too many snowballs at the kids who were there with their parents.  Farangs (= foreigners) can probably be forgiven for many errors of etiquette but bashing a kid with a rock-hard snowball would probably lose me all sorts of Bhuddist kharma points.

• My reincarnation would probably be as a deep-fried cockroach

Iced or grassed?

Thailand has recently legalised the use of cannabis – but no one I spoke to knew how the new laws would be applied.  Many cannabis shops have Bob Marley / Rastafarian images spray-painted on their hoardings, suggesting that this heralded a new era of love and dope and free-wheeling and whatsup man? 

I went into one shop and saw a young man paying for a bag of vegetables. 

I guess they were not Brussels Sprouts, as he was also buying a couple of packets of cigarette papers and as the shop displayed a variety of bongs and skull-shaped smoking devices.

The Fat Buds emporium is located in the Sathorn diplomatic area of Bangkok – many embassies and government offices and hotels are nearby.  I have looked at the Thai government website trying to determine who can buy this grass and can find no clear answer.  Perhaps on my next visit to Fat Buds I will pop in and grab a bag of weed and a few rolling papers … and a lifetime subscription to McDonalds to combat the munchies I believe are part of all this stuff.

• Or perhaps I’ll just have a G&T instead

And tomorrow …?

Thailand has recently held elections and the future of this wonderful country is once again unclear. 

Some people say that the military junta under General Prayuth has been a superb stabilising force in a kingdom formerly torn apart by yellow shirt / red shirt partisans.  Some suggest that ousted former PM Thaksin Shinawatra may return to Thailand after having received a royal pardon from the current king.

It seems that the younger people of Thailand are finally having their say and that the Move Forward Party may shape the future of the country … but others fear that the Shinawatra family may get their sticky fingers back into the pie … and others fear that the Thai monarchy may enforce even more stringent lèse majesté laws to protect their privileged position (over 200 people have this year been convicted of lèse majesté offences already, and curiously and frighteningly, the possession of little yellow rubber ducks in Thailand is now a potential crime) … and some say that the military junta has quietly achieved so much for the benefit of the nation in better roads and railways … So who knows …?

Whatever happens politically, I am sure that Thailand will continue to offer great dining, great boxing and great ladyboy shows, and other exciting pop-up events. Opera Siam is promising to tackle fire and ice in July as it offers Richard Strauss’ opera Salomé.

• Tearing the veils off this magical Kingdom is what makes it such an attractive a place to visit or to live.

I am not sure when – if ever – I will be able to return to Thailand, but whatever that date may be, I hope it is not too far away.

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Journey May – June 2023

Text and photographs with ** © Christopher Hall June 2023

All other photographs from the Internet

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In my blogs I try to present a snapshot of the places I have discovered during a brief visit.   I am not trying to present a detailed picture of the whole city or the whole region or the whole country.

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If a man ascended into heaven and gazed upon the whole workings of the universe and the beauty of the stars, the marvellous sight would give him no joy if he had to keep it to himself. And yet, if only there had been someone to describe the spectacle to, it would have filled him with delight.

• Attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero – On Friendship

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