It is one of those dreaded traveling days. You know the ones. The days when you spend more time on some
form of transportation than you do actually being somewhere. But as travel days go, this shouldn’t
have been a particularly bad one. We
started the morning at our hotel in Kanchanaburi. Yes, the elephant place. Don’t worry, that story is coming soon to a
blog near you! The friendly owner of the hotel had already arranged a taxi for
us at 9:00 a.m. to take us to the bus station downtown. We caught the 9:30 bus with no trouble at all
and were well on our way back to Bangkok. The trip a few days before from BK to
Kanchanaburi took just over two hours.
So we knew we’d be back before noon.
A quick taxi to the hotel and we’d have plenty of time to make it to our
scheduled cooking class at 1:40. No
sweat.
When am I going to learn to stop prematurely counting my chickens? The bus took much longer for no apparent
reason. There wasn’t any extra
traffic. We got into the taxi at 12:15. But all was still good. We had left extra
time for such a contingency. We could
still drop the bags at our hotel and get to our class with time to spare, just
enough time, in fact, to get a quick lunch in between. The hotel was right on the way. The problem?
The taxi driver didn’t know that.
I had a map with an X clearly marked on it. I had the name of the streets and the name of
the hotel printed out nicely in Thai for him.
He said he could read it and knew where to go. I’m starting to think that wasn’t true. He certainly didn’t speak any English. So quizzing him wasn’t going to work. But he acted so confident that he knew where
he was going, that I didn’t question it at first. On the map, there was an actual picture of
the Rama VIII bridge, which we crossed with no trouble. It is a huge landmark of the city, and so not
a surprise that he found it with no trouble.
 |
| Here's a picture of the bridge. Notice that it is taken from the water (this will be important to the story). |
The map then showed that we should take the first left and
then a quick right, and boom, we’d be at our hotel. Dude didn’t turn left. OK, we thought, maybe there is a one-way
street he knows about and we don’t and we’ll turn left at the next one. No?
OK, maybe my map is only showing the major streets and so it really is a
little farther than I think. Five
minutes pass. Ten. No turns.
I gesture. I plead with body
language. Twenty minutes. He is not turning left. I am now extremely
agitated. To add to the (di)stress, it
is a plain fact that every taxi in Bangkok has a huge gas tank in the trunk and
so there is very little room for suitcases.
I am sitting in the front seat with my suitcase taking up all of the well
space where my feet should be. My half
broken foot is smashed against the clutch-box, but that is OK because it lost
feeling about a half hour back. The
tingling sensation has now also taken over my left leg and the entire lower
half of my body is officially “asleep”. But
the top half is very much awake and not in any sort of Zen state, I can assure
you. Our hotel is supposed to be very
near the river over which spans that bridge we crossed way the heck back there.
Granted, the traffic is worse than you can possibly imagine
if you have never been to a place like Bangkok where nobody pays any attention
to traffic signals or roadsigns and there are more cars than there is road
space, thus forcing many to drive on curbs and sidewalks. But traffic or no, we should have turned left
about five kilometers back! I keep
showing the map to the driver. He keeps
nodding and talking at me like I
shouldn’t be telling him how to do his job.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t
think he is swindling us out our lunch money.
I think he is just a complete idiot who refuses to acknowledge that he
has no clue where he is going.
A full 45 minutes has passed since we crossed that bridge,
and as far as I can tell we are nowhere near our hotel. I can’t read any of the road signs or any of
the names on the map itself. There are
44 letters in the Thai alphabet, not including the 22 vowels. Every word is a mile long (case in point? Here is the name of the temple we visited
this afternoon:
Wat Phra Chetuphon Vimonmangkiararm Rajwaramahaviharn – and the
transliteration into English actually makes it quite a bit shorter than the original Thai - I kid you
not). But of course it is all written in
Thai, which is a beautiful language to look at, but impossible to decipher
without hours of spare time and a CIA code book. So how can I say with complete authority that
I’m right and he is wrong and “turn this &^@#%&^@ing car around!”? What
are my choices? We could just pile out
of the car and find another taxi to drive us back from Laos or wherever the
heck he’s taken us at this point. But
then a) we’d be paying double the fare, b) how do we know we aren’t
wrong?, c) can we trust the next driver any more than this one?, d) this is not a
nice part of town, there are no other white people with suitcases in sight and
we’d be easy pickings, especially since we are obviously desperate, and e) how
would I accomplish all of that when my legs have been asleep for so long that
I’m fairly certain I’d fall on my “butler” the second I attempted it?
By now it is clear to me that we are absolutely not going to
make the prearranged cooking class after finding our hotel and dumping our
luggage. I try plan B. We give him new directions. “Forget the hotel,” I say by demonstratively taking
the map and pretending to rip it up and throw it away. Take us straight to this address (I show him
the intersection instructions for the cooking class)! Now he loses it. He starts swearing and foaming at the
mouth. What’s he so mad for? His meter is still running. He’s going to make a killing off his own
mistake! Well, to shorten the story a
bit, after another half hour of driving which includes two more trips over the
river (!), he drops us off at the corner where we are to meet our chef exactly
in time to start the class. There will
be no lunch, sorry kids. We pay
him. He drives off without even giving
us our change. Good riddance,
buddy.
All is well, miraculously, only now we have all of our
luggage with us and we are supposed to be going grocery shopping with the rest
of the class. Great. But I’ll get to the
cooking class in the next blog post. To
finish this episode I need to fast forward to the moment our class is
done. “How can we get to our hotel from
here?” I ask our cooking school director.
I tell him the story of our inept driver. “Oh yes, he says, we have very bad taxi
drivers in Bangkok. But I can call you
another.” “Huh?” The real problem, he
says (I paraphrase), is that your hotel is in a very bad part of town as far as
traffic goes, and it is rush hour. “It
could cost you over 500 Baht on the meter.”
Well, 500 Baht is only about $18, but that is not the issue. Our previous ride, which took well over an
hour cost us under 200 Baht on the meter (though the driver left with the full
200). So doing the math, I grimaced at
the three hour (though only 8 km) drive ahead.
“Is there any other way?”, I plead. “You could take a boat,” he says, but
then continues with “But that will be difficult with all of your luggage.” “NO!
We’re fine! Where is this
magical boat?”
Well, it turns out that it is a two kilometer walk to the
river through unbelievably crowded sidewalks filled with hawker stands and
commuters and gawking tourists and almost never enough room to get by while
wheeling our luggage. Steps and curbs
and other such obstacles are always rough because Josh’s suitcase is too heavy
for him on anything but a straightaway.
Chloe is a trooper, other than the constant complaining of being tired
and overheated. But at least she can
manage her own belongings. Our backpacks
are getting heavier by the block. My
foot is now swollen and blue (at least it is in my mind as I can’t actually see
it under my sock and am not about to stop to look). But we do eventually make it to the dock,
onto the boat, up the river and off the boat at a dock that, not surprisingly,
is located directly beneath the bridge that I referred to a few paragraphs
back. It is about a five block trek to our
hotel. We were right the whole
time. For a car coming off the bridge,
the first left and then the first right would have done the trick nicely. Remember the photo? It was taken from the dock that was five blocks from our hotel.
We aren’t above being bitter, but after what turned into a
ten hour ordeal (including a nice three hour respite for cooking in the middle)
we were simply too exhausted to be bitter.
And there were repercussions in the end, not including the need to
amputate my foot. We had a bike tour of
the city scheduled for 8:00 the next morning (which was
this morning as I write this the next evening).
It was meant to start a few blocks from the cooking school. That was not going to happen. Carol wrote the bike people an apology e-mail
and said we simply were not going to make it because we all had the stomach
flu. Actually, it wasn’t even really a
lie. My stomach hasn’t been right since
Mexico back in December. Chloe and Josh
aren’t much better. Carol is a
rock. But you all knew that.
So we didn’t tour the city this morning. We slept in.
Then we rode the boat back and forth to bookend our own walking tour of
the town, which was wonderful, not in small part, because it involved exactly
zero taxis.
No comments:
Post a Comment