Learning to love Bangkok BO
Josh Martin discovers Thailand’s notorious street smells can be a kind of security blanket.
What is that smell? My impression of South East Asia is a wonderful mix of beauty, exoticism and a fascinating collection of cultures.
But what hit me first was a thick wall of hot stink that made me want to turn back inside the arrivals hall and catch the next plane.
A humid night (is there any other in Bangkok?), tuk tuk fumes, fish guts, street food stalls, wet dog, sewers (or maybe just sewage) and yes, some tropical floral notes for balance. Welcome to Thailand.
This heady mix can stop jetlag in its tracks. Ainslee and I have popped up in some bustling metropolises and bumpkin backwaters, but have yet to find an overloading scent to compare to Parfum de Bangkok aka ‘‘Thailand smell’’.
Now I know Rotorua has a bad rap whiff-wise, but at least its sulphuric pong is identifiable and strangely natural. But man-made Thailand Smell was almost like the city had collected a sample from every street, eaten it and gifted us the by-product. It has become the bar for any foreign odour that we just can’t put our finger on.
BYE-BYE BAG
And yet, how I longed to be smacked in the face with another whopper of Bangkok BO two weeks later as the reality had sunk in that I was 1000km and one rather pesky border crossing away from Bangkok’s New Zealand Embassy. Consulates being handy for times when you lose valuables – like passports.
The smell would (strangely) reassure me that without a passport, wallet or phone I would be ok, because someone with a thick Kiwi accent and a smile would help me when I clearly couldn’t help myself.
But I was not in Bangkok. I was in Luang Prabang, Laos, previously carefree, now passportfree. In not one of my brightest moments I had, after a long dirt road bus journey, put my small bag of valuables among a pyramid of large packs on a tuk tuk trailer bound for our lodgings.
Four bags went in; three bags came out. The remaining bag got a free tour of the Unesco-listed World Heritage city of Luang Prabang, lost in a sea of red tuk tuks while its owner slowly descended into meltdown. No sense even to catch a scent of what this new town was all about.
JOIN THE LOSERS
I was not alone, apparently. Close to 10,000 New Zealanders lose their passports each year. Although a fair chunk of that number are lost or stolen within New Zealand’s border, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) is kept busy by the others which go walkabout in tourist hotspots such as Paris, London, Los Angeles, Rome and (yep) Bangkok.
It’s slightly easier (if still expensive) to arrive at a New Zealand consulate or embassy if you’re in a major city, but the main thought pulsing through my head as I manically biked around Luang Prabang looking for my backpack of life essentials was how on earth I would leave maddening, bureaucratic Laos in order to get any replacement documents ordered from a New Zealand embassy in Bangkok.
The amount of scrutiny and ‘‘extra fees’’ just to get into the country with the right travel documents was hard enough.
Just as I was considering the merits of Ainslee and I setting up a new life in Luang Prabang as stateless citizens – I figured selling banana pancakes at the night markets or being a Communist Party rubber-stamper couldn’t be too hard – my moment of idiocy was somehow forgiven.
The tuk tuk driver returned, valuables in hand. I was not going to be an MFAT statistic. We would not need to remain marooned in Laos awaiting help from a faraway, faceless embassy. I could return easily to Bangkok, to where I had started and again smell the Parfum de Bangkok and it would not conjure up memories of tense form-filling, grovelling to parents for cash, overnight bus rides or explaining my sorry situation to a lowly ranked member of the communist Lao People’s Revolutionary Party at the Thai border – an adventure ruined.
No, the ‘‘Thailand Smell’’ will happily be connected to the first hit after a 14-hour plane journey from Auckland, a South-East Asian sensory overload, where the worst we thought could happen would be some dodgy street food and a stench of dirty canals and tuk tuk fumes.
Josh Martin is a London-based Kiwi journalist, who writes about travel, tourism, business, and consumer issues in between trips to places you’d rather be. Email josh.martin@fairfaxmedia.co.nz if you have a travel issue you’d like him to write about.