First overseas stop: Bangkok
A day late: I planned to send this yesterday but went out for lunch at noon and didn’t leave the bar where I had lunch until after 10 last night! Shocking. The only travel I have done this week is coming home from Auckland - it was just a reverse order of what I did to get there, save that there was no cute kid to enliven the voyage. I ate out almost every night when I was up there - my favourite was when I met friends for dinner at Petaling Malaysian Restaurant for a feast.
I’ve started the application for my Chinese visa - their instructions are very confusing: I may or may not have to attend the Christchurch Consulate for fingerprinting, and the steps look like they are changing again in mid June. Something I was not ready for: they want information about lost passports. The information they want is in the lost passports. They seem to have dropped the requirement for information about prior visits to China - that I do have.
I have been looking into travel insurance. Because I don’t know when I am coming home, and will definitely be away more than 60, even 90 days, local providers have nothing to help. Luckily there are international travel insurance outfits that basically let me subscribe to insure as long as I am away - World Nomads and Heymondo are two I have found. Because of the problems with accessing the outside world while in China, I’ve acquired a phone which takes an eSim, and have been trialling an eSim here. It did drop out once, but seems OK with one oddity - when I do google searches for, say a book, the advertisements give prices in zloty - for those who don’t know, that’s the national currency of Poland. It is not the currency we use in New Zealand. My credit card reveals I paid someone in Abu Dhabi for it.
Bangkok
It’s a bit of a tradition of Kiwis to do the great OE - although none of my siblings and not really anyone from where I grew up went. It took me quite a while to decide to go. Like many, mine was to take me to England, where I could (and did) get a working holiday visa for two years, so long as I arrived there before I turned 28. So in the last months of my 27th year, I boarded a Thai Air flight. [Looking back, I see that they hadn’t long been flying to Auckland, with their flights starting in December 1987.]
It seemed silly to go all the way to London without at least hopping out and taking a look at Bangkok. That’s a while ago now, so I don’t have total recall - no internet based newsletters in those days to record my travels, and I wasn’t one to keep a diary. But I do have some fairly distinct memories. I was staying in the Indra Regent Hotel in the garment District, Pratunam. Apart from the dinner I had had in Mai Thai in Auckland, the night before I left, this was my first exposure to Thai food. It’s fair to say that going to a fairly fancy Auckland restaurant was not much help. I can remember lots of long outside tables, hordes of people, little food stalls and, most particularly, metal boxes about the size of a tea chest with something like the barrel of a washing machine in it. These were being used to cook noodle dishes - even then, I had no idea what was in the dishes, but they were delicious.
On about my third day there, I ran into a friendly fellow: I knew he was a scammer, but I was curious and thought myself smart enough to explore his scam without being caught by it. Boy was I wrong! The basic idea (and I am pretty sure some variant is still running) is that I would play cards, poker specifically, and help the fellow I met to cheat the nephew or cousin or something of the Sultan of Brunei - one of the richest men in the world. One of the players would tip me off so I knew when it was safe to bet against this target. We went off somewhere - again, even then, I had no idea where - to play. I did really well for hours, but then I either made a mistake, or the scam against me was perfected, and I was down about $1,500. They didn’t want cash, so we had a tour of several gold sellers so I could buy gold of the right value. They were “kind” - they dropped me at my hotel (dumb move on my part to let them know where I was staying) and promised to keep the gold in a wardrobe, and would pick me up in the morning to win it back.
Looking back at it now, they probably had no intention to do any such thing, but here’s me - still essentially a kid from the country, down a lot of money and fearful that they were guys who could really hurt me. So I got up early and left, not just my hotel, but Bangkok entirely. I caught a bus to Chiang Mai - my only memory is that it took forever, and that I was going to a place I had no plan to visit and really knew nothing about. I do remember cool local bands playing in cafes and a bus trip to Chiang Rai where, to get some lunch, I pointed at some food another customer was eating. The waitress shook her head, it wasn’t something I’d like, and produced something else.
Back in Bangkok, I stayed on Khao San Road - the standard destination for every newbie traveler to Bangkok. I lasted one night in a wee cubicle without air-conditioning, in summer, where the walls didn’t even reach the ceiling, before I checked into a regular hotel.
On the day I was to leave, I went to the post office to buy stamps to send postcards home, putting my passport on the counter while I did so. By the time I had my stamps, it was gone. I know I still had my travelers cheques, because I remember cashing one in London, but I don’t know why I couldn’t use them in Bangkok. I must have also had a credit card, because I lived on it when I got to London, but again couldn’t use it in Bangkok. Maybe I needed a passport? What I do remember is having no cash. Luckily in those days, New Zealand had proper consular services in Bangkok, so I went to the embassy where they organised a passport for me, and gave me some cash ($300 from memory), although not much was left by the time I paid for the passport. Of course, I missed my flight, so had to stay another couple of nights.
Whatever the reason, by the final last day in Bangkok, I was skint again. A group of people from England got talking with me, wanted me to go on a trip on the Chao Praya river with them. They really were kind - they got me a ticket and bought me dinner, and basically looked after me until it was time to go to the airport.
I have now been to Bangkok several times, and love the place, but I’ve never had a visit like my first one.