Khlong Saen Saeb

Crash.. As we pull in at speed, the wooden hull slams against the pier. Two helmeted crew members jump ashore, ropes in hand. There waiting silently, stoically on land, is an adorable Thai girl in an unfeasibly short skirt and 3” high heels. “Oh dear,.. the misfortunate," I think to myself as the boat beneath heaves and splutters, noxious diesel fumes permeating the air, my brain. “How will she get on while maintaining an ounce of decorum, her dignity?"

Her reply? She hops assertively off the landing stage, plants a foot on the gunwale, grabs the rope and swings down and into the hull next to me – all in a matter of seconds and with the casual aplomb, not to mention sex appeal, of an Asian Lara Croft. I'm left surprised and smitten. But for this 9-to-5 office worker meets dressed-to-kill stuntwoman it’s par for the course, all in a day’s getting to work.

I'm on Khlong Saen Saep, a line of dirty brown water that weaves its way through the city. Why did it take me so long? It’s fowl, ugly, smelly and dangerous, but also fast, cheap, quick, exhilarating and awesome. Think public transport meets extreme sports - Venice on Popeye’s favourite spinach. The boats surge along at speed, stopping off at piers bisecting Bo Bae market, Pratunam, Childom, Asok, Nana and Thonglor, among other areas. It begins by Pan Faa bridge, in the Old City, and ends out in Bangna, and the journey from one to the other costs only 20 baht.

It must be so cheap because its a deathtrap. Fall in and you’ll be submerged in what resembles Willy Wonka’s scrumptious chocolate lake but is, actually, a poisonous toxic sludge (one hapless Thai pop star did and subsequently died of a fungal brain infection). Stick your head up to catch a breeze and you’ll be decapitated by one of Bangkok’s many low-slung bridges, only for your bloated torso to resurface days later in the Chao Phraya, tangled poetically amidst clutches of water hyacinth. But it’s the deckhands who really do dance with death - they walk the rim of the boat, one hand hanging on for dear life, the other rummaging for small change as they collect fairs.

Hailing from the UK, a country where every danger is systematically scrubbed out of existence by dour Health and Safety bureaucrats, thus rendering modern life banal, and ultimately futile, I think this is brilliant. You’re overwhelmingly alive, Khlong San Saeb screams, because one slip means you won’t be. It’s like a faulty fairground ride that’s been adapted to transport the clinically insane. And that’s precisely why I love it.

Spicy Club: Ron Muang Soi Neung

On a sultry night, down a shady anonymous backstreet, a city is resisting the call to sleep. This resistance has a name: Spicy. A form: a long dark hall suffused in wan blue light. And it has a function: at around 1am each night it fills with smoke, incipid music and a mob of drunk humanity.

They hop from Tuk-Tuks, they stumble out of taxis, they shuffle through a ramshackle yard, they hand over 300 baht... Not the city’s urban youth or funked-up fashionistas, but guys from the West: 20-plus aspirant Don Juan’s hailing from everywhere from New Cross to New Delhi. And girls from the North: dark skinned, gaudily dressed, shit loads of them…

Amidst this motley, at the foot of a raised circular podium, stand three Middle Eastern men bearing whisky in one hand and cigarettes in the other. “You have a light?” I ask one with darting eyes above the bounce of techno-pop (“Are youu go-oing to Sannn Frannn.. sciscoo?...). Dressed in a debonair grey shirt, he's transfixed on something. He barely blinks as he reaches into his pocket. I look up, to see what he’s staring at and my eyes meet a pair of ice white panties. The person wearing them – a dark skinned girl with streaks of blond and an intricate snake tattoo down the length of her left leg – shuffles closer to aid their view. So intensely are they studying her, you'd think she was a classic Greek statue in the British Museum - only slightly less naked and not priceless. The powerplay is ambiguous: the lust dripping from their eyes they want little more than a fuck toy, her pockmarked visage displays all the relish of an eagle about to sink its talons into a helpless field mouse (Thailand’s exploiter/exploited dynamic is more nuanced than the world thinks... )

Metres away, two sallow guys with cropped hair, distended stomachs and an East London twang prowl the floor. They strike up conversation with two willowy Thai girls, one pouring them whisky from atop a standup table, both in dainty dresses and high heels. Above the throb of mainstream beats, the patter commences: “where you come from?”, “you have girlfriend?”, “you speak thai?”. Like a rice paddy’s furrows in the choking dust of dry season, the conversation quickly dries up. But it doesn’t matter: five minutes later both couplets are locked in a hip swaying dance of fascination; five minutes more they’re gone…

“Ow Eek krup?” a tender hums in my ear before I've even begun to entertain the thought of downing the last of my ice swarmed drink. Service isn’t bad here. When the bill arrives with my next drink two minutes later, I realize that’s because prices are. I pick up my change (a conniving wedge of 20 baht notes), and dodge past the entangled, the ensnared, the lustlorn, the gruesome, the ravishing, the ridiculous. After a feeble attempt to dance, I stand there, swaying, wanting, lusting.... hating. As my taxi turns the corner and down the soi, into a brighter hopefully more salubrious day, I think of ‘Taxi Driver’: “Someday a real rain will come wash all this scum off the streets". Let's hope I’m indoors...

Saraburi's Sunflower Fields

We were wilting in the not-so-cool-season sunshine but the sunflowers couldn’t get enough... A trip to witness the scenic splendour that is Saraburi province’s sunflower fields comes highly recommended. Tantawan, as they are known in Thai, are grown as a commercial crop there and in bloom from November until March, when farmers harvest them for their seed and oil.

Apart from reaping what they sow, local farmers also have a sideline: charging visitors a meagre 5 baht fee for the right to explore. Stroll among the plant's tall green stalks, get your picture taken with your arms around the neck of a flower, as if it’s an old friend, and admire the sweeping yellow vista that comes framed by the area's rolling limestone hills. Nice.

We visited on a glorious December afternoon, a public holiday across the Kingdom. But while the crowds were out en masse, they were still vastly outnumbered by armies of vivacious yellow plants, all in formation, each one bright and big, round face inched hungrily toward the sun. Some visitors stood and stared. Others wandered into the far reaches of the field, immersed in reverie. Most though - friends, families and lovers - took to posing playfully for photographs, heads bobbing above a sea of vivid golden yellow – the King’s colour.

Like the students laughing, exuberant and joyous, while triumphantly grappling a flower head and each other. Or the young mother hoisting up her young child as the father strives to snap the ultimate mantelpiece photo. Nearby, an elephant lolled its head, languorously, while children nearby posed inside giant plastic sunflower moulds, pulling ‘V’ signs. Off in the distance a lone spirit house stood sentinel, meadow spirits swarming, invisibly, in the ether around it...

We wandered beneath a multi-coloured canopy lined with stalls. Resembling a village fete, there was a range of colourful local produce for sale: fruit juice, fruit wines and sunflower-themed knick-knacks ranging from hair-clips to umbrellas. Our favourite was the local honey stall, on top of which was sat a large beehive, a cloud of disgruntled bees buzzing anxiously above it, disputing their eviction. Deliciously sweet, we bought a small Sangsom bottles worth for 60 baht. A couple of stalls down, we then procured some fresh sunflower seeds. Filled with mineral content the disk seeds – the hundreds of spikes that fill the face - are a stunning source of protein (50 baht a bag). They also made a fantastic snack for the less than two hour drive home…

Living in a Bangkok Box

I don’t normally go in for self-diagnosis, but all the symptoms are there: I’ve got Bangkok cabin fever. While knocking around my room just recently, usually when hung-over, I’ve been overcome by this overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. Restlessness snowballs into this sudden urge to smash the contents of my room into a trillion tiny pieces. I can’t breathe, there’s no where to go. I begin conversing with the bugs that keep marching for the sugar-coated sanctuary that is my fridge top. As they climb down the walls, I’m literally climbing up them.

Why? Because like millions of others in Bangkok I choose to live in a shoebox. And, no, not a long Michael Jordan size 17 shoebox, but a narrow toddlers training shoe shoebox. A Bangkok estate agent would probably disagree: they’d call my 32 square metre studio ‘cute’, ‘cozy’ or ‘compact’; a ‘highly functional space perfectly attuned to the demands of modern city living’ or some such rot. It’s not. That’s a lie. It’s a fucking prison cell. Ok, I’m exaggerating, slightly. Take away the Hi-speed Internet, Cable TV and chic modular furniture, THEN it’s a fucking prison cell. “Yes, but it looks good” you say. Yes, I retort, but aesthetics matters not a jot when you can’t see straight because, instead of breathing God’s good air, you’re recycling your own for 12 hours on end.

A midget with a penchant for sniffing his own feet may relish life in here, but not me. I’m endlessly falling over tables, tripping over shoes, backing onto cupboard doors. The sound of a glass smashing, or of me yelping as I yet again stub my big toe (the left one usually) frequently echoes down my ironically much more capacious corridor. And this grim parable of 21st century Bangkok living only gets worse. In a SE Asian take on ‘Birdman from Alcatraz’ I’m forming bonds with my studio’s biosphere: playing chase with lost geckos, observing the behavioral patterns of ants, having mercy on those bugs that resemble cute cockroaches. This isn’t right. Humans SHOULD NOT be made to live in so confined a space. Not unless we’ve killed grandma anyway. Frankly living here it sometimes feels like I may as well have, when in truth my only crime is ranking only a couple of notches above pauper on the socio-economic ladder.

Don’t worry about me though. I’m plotting my escape. However, rather than furrowing a hole through the wall with my toothbrush (which I've considered), I’m taking the sane tack and looking for a new place. And what can I afford in Bangkok? Well, unless I move to the back-end-of-Bangkok, I’ve discovered the answer is another dull functional box. Arrrh! Another room I’ll struggle to swing a Siamese cat in without getting viscera all over the generic cream walls (that's probably a deposit breaker). Aarrh!!! This isn’t fair. Look around you – Bangkok is in the throes of a building frenzy. Glam new hotels and shiny new condo developments are popping up faster than genital warts after a Nana Plaza shopping spree. Many of the latter sell out in days, before they’ve even begun building. Who buys them all? Moneyed Thai and expat speculators who buy-to-let and, when they get around to it, lease them out. There seems to be plenty of space, so where’s mine?

Of course some of you will say ‘Oh, shut up’. But you don’t understand. I’m an Englishman. My home is my castle. I should be able to play King. Oh look! – there go more fucking ants. Off with their heads!

Montonn Jira at Club Culture

Through a heaving mass of khaki clad revellers, marches a handsome DJ dressed in Soviet era outfit and furry hat. Accompanied by staccato drumrolls and a squad of new model army girls wielding toy guns, his ascent to the stage yields screams of adulation and, within seconds, he’s shooting down the crowd with an assault of earsplitting minimal techno. Locked onto the rhythm, bodies succumb, syncopating themselves to the rolling beat.

Nope, not a louche warehouse party in Moscow or Berlin, but Bangkok’s very own Club Culture on Saturday night. The occasion: Montonn Jira – Thai luk krung model, actor, heartthrob and minimal DJ – was playing host to an imaginative Smirnoff Experience sponsored event entitled ‘The Revolutionaire’. The dress code was militant, and, wow , the girls in their khaki slacks and face paint were looking especially disarming. “Since we were kids, we’ve grown up with Montonn. He’s so cute” said one foxy Thai foot soldier daubed in thick camouflage stripes, suggesting that perhaps it was ‘Montonn the pretty boy’, more than ‘Montonn the musician’ that made tonight such a success.

Not that I cared. After him, Bangkok Impact - a one-man disco-tech outfit helmed by an acid casualty from Finland - sounded stunning. Somewhat strange to see the subterranean chaos of minimal shoehorned successfully into a swanky corporate event, but still a great night. No revolution but certainly part of the much needed war on terrible.

Burma's Protesting Pooches

Forget Benji, the Littlest Hobo, or ever-so loyal Lassie. While these iconic mutts have earnt respectable footnotes in the annuls of fictional TV history, a few wretched pooches in Burma have just trounced them, not by rescuing small children from burning houses or anything, but by heading straight for the bone-afide history books.

Dissident doggies, politicized pooches, the hounds of Burmaville, call them what you will - a small pack of street dogs in Burma are protesting against the despicable regime by prowling the streets with pictures of the four tyrannical generals around their necks. This at a time when, after the armies brutal crackdown, people daren’t or can’t voice their disgust.

Piss off home Lassie – humanity has found a new best friend.

Protesting Dogs Are Now on the Regime’s Wanted List, by Saw Yan Naing writing
for Irrawaddy, October 12, 2007

The Burmese authorities have a new enemy to hunt down—dogs which are roaming Rangoon with pictures of Than Shwe and other regime leaders around their necks.

A resident of Shwegondine, Bahan Township, told The Irrawaddy on Friday that she saw a group of four dogs with pictures of the regime’s top generals around their necks.

Sightings were also reported in four other Rangoon townships — Tharkayta, Dawbon, Hlaing Tharyar and South Okkalapa.

Some sources said the canine protest had started at least a week ago, and was keeping the authorities busy trying to catch the offending dogs. “They seem quite good at avoiding arrest,” laughed one resident.

Associating anybody with a dog is a very serious insult in Burma. Spray-painters are also at work, daubing trains with the words “Killer Than Shwe” and other slogans.

Irrawaddy Homepage: http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=8998

Silom's Breaks Bar

Clubbing in Silom is hard to get enthused about. It's a torpid scene at best. There’s the wishy-washy house of Silom Soi 4’s Moroccan grotto-like Tapas, or the vapid hip-hop of Luminous (a joyous den that’s seemingly ignorant to the joys of Grandmaster Flash or Pharoahe Monch or any other hip-hop luminary). Delve into the sweaty armpit of neon sin, Patpong, there’s Soi 1’s Twilo – louche haunt of the 1am temptress, sleazy merry-go-round of shouty hip-pop covers – or the minimal techno beats of the diminutive Funky Dojo’s which straddles it. None inspire me, most agitate.

However, in Silom's less than flourishing foothills, up a rarely beaten path known as Soi 2/1, hides an untamed beast which refuses to be cowed into commercial submission, and which registers narely a blip on the radar of Patpong’s predatory off-duty hookers and their grievous prey. Its name is Breaks Bar. And while diminutive in club size and status, it’s a fucking giant judging by the pleasing rumbling sound we found emanating from its dimly lit belly on Saturday night.

The night was called Light Low Down – a 'Britpop, rock, punk, alter and breakbeat' affair the flyer informed, helmed by DJs with anonymous names like Oaky, Mix, and the slightly better EroticBoy. With a dearth of light and an excess of kids in trendy shirts it felt like a dinghy London house party. But in a good way - minus the inane chattering pillheads and people snorting lines of K off every available horizontal surface. When not waving their hands or hugging friends, everyone was jumping around like bad-tempered two-year olds during a dizzy spell.


The DJ – don't know his name but he new his music, how to cut records and wore a yellow cap – was verging on sublime, throwing at us an assured, hyperactive, and above all fun set that touched on every just about contemporary music reference point worth referring to: electro, hip-hop, breakbeat, garage rock, slices of 90s pop. Ok, so 45 seconds of Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m too Sexy’ was just plain wrong, but so many gems (Chemical Brothers 'Salmon Song', Simian, Daft Punk, Justice, many more) meant all was more than forgiven. My friend succinctly summed up the concensus: “I’d go back every weekend if I knew he was playing”.

With rows of lopsided 12” covers hanging off the walls, Breaks Bar is clearly a space crafted by aficionados, for aficionados. Good for them. The problem with most clubs in Bangkok is their mentality. They pander to the sonic simplicity of the masses - no, they pander to their idea of what they think is the sonic simplicity of the masses (even the tastes of the musical philistine are more sophisticated than clubs give them credit for). They drop the element of surprise, reducing DJs to posturing human jukeboxes who rather than deserving of our respect and applause deserve only repeated short sharp jabs to the eyes with blunt chopsticks. For those sick with this musical malaise, who fancy cocking a proverbial finger at Bangkok’s insipid clubbing establishment, or who just plain and simple like good filthy dance music:

Breaks Bar