Return to Bangkok

I hadn't been to Bangkok since back in 2002 (I think it was back then).  It had been a very long time since I had stepped foot in this city.  My memories were of a crazy place.  It was dirty, disorganised and crowded with people.  It was not a pretty city at all, and it felt in every way a enormous sprawling third world city.  Everywhere we went, there was poverty and a desperate need for infrastructure investment.

However, even then, there were small shoots of change.  When we were there, the first line of the new mass transit railway had just opened.  I remember going for a ride on it with my friends who lived in Thailand.  They mentioned that not many people rode it yet because of its cost, but it was a gleaming new example of some of the changes that seemed to be coming.  Still, for us it was nothing more than a novelty as we soon jumped back onto the trusty old tuktuks to get to where we needed to.

This trip showed something very different.  The Bangkok I remembered had been consigned the pages of history.  In its place was a city developing fast.

There was modern buildings everywhere, the mass transit system had been developed further.  The entire city just felt cleaner and more organised as well.  The streets were no longer strewn with rubbish, but instead, it felt like this was a city that was on the cusp of joining the ranks of the global modern metropolises.  Even something as simple as the tuktuks weren't what I remembered.  There were now taxis everywhere, modern taxis which actually put the taxis in Hong Kong to shame in terms of their comfort and make.  Everyone seemed to be using these taxis as their day to day transport instead of the tuktuks.  When we went to catch a tuktuk, I was shocked that the prices were higher than the taxis and there was a general refusal to negotiate the prices much at all.  The tuktuks weren't a integral part of the transport system anymore, and were now clearly something reserved for tourists looking for an "authentic experience".