Salon Wanderlust | Earth odyssey

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

Earth Odyssey

A L S O__T O D A Y

Can this planet be saved?
By Don George
Mark Hertsgaard discusses his new book about the human toll of global environmental devastation
[ NEWS ]
The war against sprawl I
By Rob Gurwitt
Think Al Gore's "smart growth" plan is a no-brainer? Think again
[ NEWS ]
The war against sprawl, II
By Susan Zakin
It's owls against developers in Arizona's Oro Valley

T A B L E_T A L K
Will you party like it's 1999? Discuss your upcoming New Year's Eve plans in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
Sex and fate in Macau
By Rolf Potts
Inspired by a sidewalk fortuneteller, a traveler tries his luck at an erotic cabaret in this soon-to-be-transferred Portuguese colony
(01/20/99)
Teaching the cannibals to dance: Part Two
By Craig Nelson
A mock battle culminates in a transcultural two-step -- and an unexpected gift
(01/19/99)
Teaching the cannibals to dance
By Craig Nelson
An adventurer journeys farther than expected into a land of penis gourds and pig sacrifices
(01/17/99)
This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe
(01/15/99)
Beijing's Backingham Palace
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
From back rubs to bowling to B-movies, this Chinese spa has it all
(01/14/99)

Browse the
Wanderlust Passages archives

Wanderlust's Official
Travel Book Partner

EARTH ODYSSEY | PAGE 1, 2, 3
- - - - - - - - - -
Now, in 1992, I was returning to Thailand, and from the moment I stepped off the plane in Bangkok, the contrast with Africa was bracing. The airport terminal here was brightly lit, spacious and air-conditioned, with all the amenities one would expect from its European counterpart: clean toilets, public telephones, plenty of newsstands and restaurants. The customs and baggage claim operations were models of efficiency, and within half an hour, I was heading towards the taxi stand, where fixed-price rides downtown were offered. Since the airport was only fifteen miles north of Bangkok, I figured I might be checked into my hotel and asleep within the hour. It was, after all, past midnight and I was exhausted after twenty-four hours of travel.
Outside, automobiles seemed to be everywhere, another culture shock. My taxi was a late-model BMW whose plush back seat was more comfortable than most beds I had had in Africa. The expressway was crowded with similar vehicles; Thailand was one of the world's leading markets for Mercedeses, and second only to the United States in purchases of pickup trucks. The highway was in good repair, too, more reminiscent of the autobahns of Germany than the crumbling pavement of Nairobi; three and sometimes four lanes traveled in each direction, with guardrails in between. High above loomed huge lighted billboards with names like Sony, Siemens and Samsung in sparkling colors, as if making clear to the newly arrived who, or rather what, was in charge here. The accompanying advertising slogans were presented not in the languorous script of Thai but the snappy authority of English, indisputable world language of the Technological Age.
And yet. Lowering my gaze from these celebrations of global consumerism, I peered into the shadows at ground level, where I saw that the highway was also straddled by slouching shantytowns that recalled the poverty of Kampala and Nairobi. Here in Bangkok, though, the shacks were crammed up to the very edge of the highway, which meant that the inhabitants, in addition to the other burdens of their existence, were treated to a ceaseless assault on their lungs, eyes, ears and nervous systems by the apparently nonstop flow of traffic.
Did I say nonstop? Actually, within three minutes of leaving the airport, the taxi was engulfed in a traffic jam that reduced our progress to stop, crawl and stop again. I remembered Bangkok's terrible traffic snarls from my visit in 1990, but I thought that arriving in the middle of the night this time would let me off the hook. Wrong. Here it was, nearly one in the morning in the middle of the week, and the highway looked like Los Angeles during Friday afternoon rush hour.
Undeterred by the tiny Buddha shrine glued to his dashboard, my taxi driver took the opportunity of one lull in the traffic to urge upon me brochures featuring photos of extremely young, naked Thai women. "I take you," he suggested, clearly hoping to drive me to the nightclub in question. When I waved the brochures away with a murmured "no thank you," he didn't argue but simply slipped them under his seat and turned his attention to our common predicament. Middle-aged and plump, he spoke very little English, but he knew the word for his primary occupational hazard.
"Traffic, bad," he announced.
"Traffic bad," I agreed. Aiming my words carefully, I asked, slowly, "Why traffic bad at night? Day, yes. But night?"
"Traffic same-same," he replied with a resigned shake of the head. "Day, night, same-same."
Though I smiled inwardly ("same-same" was a fetching piece of Thai English I recalled from my earlier visit), this was discouraging news. After poking forward in fits and starts, we finally reached the city proper some seventy-five minutes after leaving the airport. While still bumper to bumper, the traffic moved somewhat more easily downtown, perhaps because it included a higher proportion of motorbikes and tuk-tuks. Three-wheeled vehicles whose name came from the sputtering sound produced by their horribly polluting two-stroke engines, tuk-tuks looked like beat-up golf carts with roofs and back seats and functioned as inner-city taxis. Unfortunately, the advantage that tuk-tuks and motorbikes offered in terms of mobility was undercut by their prodigious tailpipe exhaust. Both vehicles burned a fuel that was part gasoline, part benzene -- benzene, of course, causes cancer -- and each flick of a driver's wrist sent thick puffs of bluish-white smoke into the already soup-like air.
I remembered from my previous visit that the pollution of Bangkok's air had been so extreme it seemed to have a tactile quality; you felt you could scoop up a handful of the stuff and splatter it against the wall like a dirty snowball. Curious, I lowered my window to check its current condition. Sure enough, it was the same viscous gunk as before, complete with that foul chemical odor that caught in the throat and used to give me a headache within two minutes of stepping onto the sidewalk. My rash gesture alarmed the taxi driver. Blurting "No, no," he quickly zapped my window closed by remote control and turned around to study me, as though trying to decide whether I were impossibly stupid or just uninformed. With a nervous, placating smile, he pointed at his dashboard and said, "Air condition."
It wasn't just the noxious fumes he wanted to block out but the awful noise. I got an earful of it when we finally reached my hotel, an ugly high-rise near the Chao Phraya river. Stepping onto the sidewalk while the driver hoisted my bags out of the trunk, I confounded the poor man again by climbing onto a nearby pile of bricks -- like much of Bangkok, the property next door was under construction -- in order to get a better view of the traffic congestion we had been part of. Off to my right, for as far as I could see, stretched three lanes of headlights, their beams semi-obscured by the copious exhaust fumes hanging in the air like dense morning fog. To my left, perhaps ten car lengths away, was a rare bit of open space, an intersection, where the front of the traffic waited impatiently for the light to change. Quite a few drivers passed the time by intermittently revving their engines. The discordant whines and buzzing this generated were bad enough, but paled next to the cacophony that erupted when the pack took off again. With everyone hitting the throttle at once -- senselessly, for where was there to go? -- it sounded like a cross between a chainsaw massacre and the Indianapolis 500.
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the entire tableau was how little it seemed to bother most Thais. My hotel room overlooked the street -- from eight floors up, thankfully -- and when I stepped onto the balcony before bed I saw on the sidewalk below an outdoor noodle shop that was doing an amazingly brisk business for two o'clock in the morning. Much of the clientele seemed to be young people. They were casually dressed, giggling, eating, drinking, smoking -- clearly enjoying themselves, while seated at tables no farther away from the traffic-clogged avenue than the shantytowns near the expressway had been. When the revelers were done, they would hop onto motorbikes, two and sometimes three to a machine, and, as if they hadn't inhaled enough poison already, expertly weave their way through the stalled traffic.
N E X T+P A G E | Traffic is just the start of the environmental nightmare


	Earth Odyssey A L S O__T O D A Y Can this planet be saved? By Don George Mark Hertsgaard discusses his new book about the human toll of global environmental devastation [ NEWS ] The war against sprawl I By Rob Gurwitt Think Al Gore's "smart growth" plan is a no-brainer? Think again [ NEWS ] The war against sprawl, II By Susan Zakin It's owls against developers in Arizona's Oro Valley T A B L E_T A L K Will you party like it's 1999? Discuss your upcoming New Year's Eve plans in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Sex and fate in Macau By Rolf Potts Inspired by a sidewalk fortuneteller, a traveler tries his luck at an erotic cabaret in this soon-to-be-transferred Portuguese colony (01/20/99) Teaching the cannibals to dance: Part Two By Craig Nelson A mock battle culminates in a transcultural two-step -- and an unexpected gift (01/19/99) Teaching the cannibals to dance By Craig Nelson An adventurer journeys farther than expected into a land of penis gourds and pig sacrifices (01/17/99) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe (01/15/99) Beijing's Backingham Palace By Mary Elizabeth Williams From back rubs to bowling to B-movies, this Chinese spa has it all (01/14/99) Browse the Wanderlust Passages archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		EARTH ODYSSEY \| PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - Now, in 1992, I was returning to Thailand, and from the moment I stepped off the plane in Bangkok, the contrast with Africa was bracing. The airport terminal here was brightly lit, spacious and air-conditioned, with all the amenities one would expect from its European counterpart: clean toilets, public telephones, plenty of newsstands and restaurants. The customs and baggage claim operations were models of efficiency, and within half an hour, I was heading towards the taxi stand, where fixed-price rides downtown were offered. Since the airport was only fifteen miles north of Bangkok, I figured I might be checked into my hotel and asleep within the hour. It was, after all, past midnight and I was exhausted after twenty-four hours of travel. Outside, automobiles seemed to be everywhere, another culture shock. My taxi was a late-model BMW whose plush back seat was more comfortable than most beds I had had in Africa. The expressway was crowded with similar vehicles; Thailand was one of the world's leading markets for Mercedeses, and second only to the United States in purchases of pickup trucks. The highway was in good repair, too, more reminiscent of the autobahns of Germany than the crumbling pavement of Nairobi; three and sometimes four lanes traveled in each direction, with guardrails in between. High above loomed huge lighted billboards with names like Sony, Siemens and Samsung in sparkling colors, as if making clear to the newly arrived who, or rather what, was in charge here. The accompanying advertising slogans were presented not in the languorous script of Thai but the snappy authority of English, indisputable world language of the Technological Age. And yet. Lowering my gaze from these celebrations of global consumerism, I peered into the shadows at ground level, where I saw that the highway was also straddled by slouching shantytowns that recalled the poverty of Kampala and Nairobi. Here in Bangkok, though, the shacks were crammed up to the very edge of the highway, which meant that the inhabitants, in addition to the other burdens of their existence, were treated to a ceaseless assault on their lungs, eyes, ears and nervous systems by the apparently nonstop flow of traffic. Did I say nonstop? Actually, within three minutes of leaving the airport, the taxi was engulfed in a traffic jam that reduced our progress to stop, crawl and stop again. I remembered Bangkok's terrible traffic snarls from my visit in 1990, but I thought that arriving in the middle of the night this time would let me off the hook. Wrong. Here it was, nearly one in the morning in the middle of the week, and the highway looked like Los Angeles during Friday afternoon rush hour. Undeterred by the tiny Buddha shrine glued to his dashboard, my taxi driver took the opportunity of one lull in the traffic to urge upon me brochures featuring photos of extremely young, naked Thai women. "I take you," he suggested, clearly hoping to drive me to the nightclub in question. When I waved the brochures away with a murmured "no thank you," he didn't argue but simply slipped them under his seat and turned his attention to our common predicament. Middle-aged and plump, he spoke very little English, but he knew the word for his primary occupational hazard. "Traffic, bad," he announced. "Traffic bad," I agreed. Aiming my words carefully, I asked, slowly, "Why traffic bad at night? Day, yes. But night?" "Traffic same-same," he replied with a resigned shake of the head. "Day, night, same-same." Though I smiled inwardly ("same-same" was a fetching piece of Thai English I recalled from my earlier visit), this was discouraging news. After poking forward in fits and starts, we finally reached the city proper some seventy-five minutes after leaving the airport. While still bumper to bumper, the traffic moved somewhat more easily downtown, perhaps because it included a higher proportion of motorbikes and tuk-tuks. Three-wheeled vehicles whose name came from the sputtering sound produced by their horribly polluting two-stroke engines, tuk-tuks looked like beat-up golf carts with roofs and back seats and functioned as inner-city taxis. Unfortunately, the advantage that tuk-tuks and motorbikes offered in terms of mobility was undercut by their prodigious tailpipe exhaust. Both vehicles burned a fuel that was part gasoline, part benzene -- benzene, of course, causes cancer -- and each flick of a driver's wrist sent thick puffs of bluish-white smoke into the already soup-like air. I remembered from my previous visit that the pollution of Bangkok's air had been so extreme it seemed to have a tactile quality; you felt you could scoop up a handful of the stuff and splatter it against the wall like a dirty snowball. Curious, I lowered my window to check its current condition. Sure enough, it was the same viscous gunk as before, complete with that foul chemical odor that caught in the throat and used to give me a headache within two minutes of stepping onto the sidewalk. My rash gesture alarmed the taxi driver. Blurting "No, no," he quickly zapped my window closed by remote control and turned around to study me, as though trying to decide whether I were impossibly stupid or just uninformed. With a nervous, placating smile, he pointed at his dashboard and said, "Air condition." It wasn't just the noxious fumes he wanted to block out but the awful noise. I got an earful of it when we finally reached my hotel, an ugly high-rise near the Chao Phraya river. Stepping onto the sidewalk while the driver hoisted my bags out of the trunk, I confounded the poor man again by climbing onto a nearby pile of bricks -- like much of Bangkok, the property next door was under construction -- in order to get a better view of the traffic congestion we had been part of. Off to my right, for as far as I could see, stretched three lanes of headlights, their beams semi-obscured by the copious exhaust fumes hanging in the air like dense morning fog. To my left, perhaps ten car lengths away, was a rare bit of open space, an intersection, where the front of the traffic waited impatiently for the light to change. Quite a few drivers passed the time by intermittently revving their engines. The discordant whines and buzzing this generated were bad enough, but paled next to the cacophony that erupted when the pack took off again. With everyone hitting the throttle at once -- senselessly, for where was there to go? -- it sounded like a cross between a chainsaw massacre and the Indianapolis 500. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the entire tableau was how little it seemed to bother most Thais. My hotel room overlooked the street -- from eight floors up, thankfully -- and when I stepped onto the balcony before bed I saw on the sidewalk below an outdoor noodle shop that was doing an amazingly brisk business for two o'clock in the morning. Much of the clientele seemed to be young people. They were casually dressed, giggling, eating, drinking, smoking -- clearly enjoying themselves, while seated at tables no farther away from the traffic-clogged avenue than the shantytowns near the expressway had been. When the revelers were done, they would hop onto motorbikes, two and sometimes three to a machine, and, as if they hadn't inhaled enough poison already, expertly weave their way through the stalled traffic. N E X T+P A G E \| Traffic is just the start of the environmental nightmare