On Bangkok

Bangkok met me with a flock of touts: three motorbike taxi drivers, two tuk-tuk jockeys, and a tour tout. It was easy to get past the tour jockey, but the drivers were tenacious.

It's a nice thing about Nakhon Si Thammarat: the songtaus just orbit their routes and honk at any pedestrians; some of the mototaxis honk and shout until you make eye contact and shake your head. Outside the BKK train station, they surrounded me and physically blocked me while demanding my destination: 200 for a tuktuk, but just a hundred for a mototaxi. Two hundred for a tuktuk, when it's 10 back home?

I should've realized what was going on when they lined up three deep to keep me from asking the cabbie his metered rate, but I relented when a mototaxi driver dropped to 80 and everyone else I could hear was saying 250 for an enclosed, air conditioned taxi.

My first impression outside of the station, and one that's upheld so far, is that traffic in Bangkok and northern Thailand is nothing. To whit:

-I've seen no cars and only seen one scooter driving on a sidewalk, and that was a teenager joyriding through a historic park.

-People honk before running yellows and don't run reds unless there's already a full intersection (going their direction).

-People honk as a courtesy, a warning that they're coming. In NST, the same courtesy is an aggressive warning, more a warning to move your ass out of the way than an announcement of your presence; people honk vigorously when merging or turning or passing; songtaus and mototaxis, which honk especially enthusiastically in any of the said situations, also honk vigorously whenever they see a pedestrian on either side of the street.

-as a pedestrian, it's possible to gauge traffic well enough that simply stepping into the flow—the only way to cross a NST street—isn't a very liveable option.

In the course of things, I ended up walking through a number of pretty highly touted guidebook destinations. But I found that out later. At the time, I was more struck by the number of English-only signs and odd bits of quirk and inconvenience—a submerged walkway, an elevated walkway, packed with tourists and overly homogenized trinkets available at considerable markup.

Maybe that's one of the benefits of all the time wandering through places where farangs shouldn't wander: I've stumbled into understanding prices and negotiations and some of the ways my kind are swindled: “MISS THIS AND YOU MAR YOUR EVERLASTING TRAVELLER'S KARMA! Not only does this place feature inferior reproductions of the products you would've been seeing for blocks had you walked via the back roads, it offers the ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY to take a photo in a hackneyed Kodak Photo Zone before you spend three times as much for the chance to shop in a place too inconvenient for the locals!”

Not that I have problems with the tourist industry: I grew up on its payoffs, will probably return to its local workforce, and I would drop a lot of money and travel-weary steps for a breakfast buffet with real potatoes, eggs, Tabasco, and Heinz. And I have no doubt that I could find it in BKK.

What I dislike is that between the dingy alleys and shiny markets, there is no change in displayed prices or proprietors' attitudes, yet the products flop 100% in quality.

And what irks me is the construct: in NST, if you follow a local through a market—a regular market and not a sidewalk carnival—you won't see haggling. You might catch a, “Really?” “Well, no,” but no haggling. Once you learn to say, “Really?” or “how much?” or “X Baht? It's only Y over there,” there is no haggling, even for a farang. And even if you don't put forth that effort/have the language skills (look at me try to sound competent), you're still saving 10-20% on what you would spend in a western-influenced mall/department store/grocery mart. But in BKK and points north, my experience is that the proprietors are after as much as they can get, i.e. the price drops 100% as soon as you make a reasonable comparison (you want 100B to take me there? It cost 40 to get here), and each number is cut by a third if the transaction is in Thai.

I guess it's like reading Thai numbers around NST: if you can read the numbers on the Thai side of the sign (or take a guess and divide the Arabic numerals by 2 or 3) and offer that amount, you end up paying the local rate, which you pay if you take the time to ask or are a repeat customer. But either situation is a rarity, so the chance to haggle is as much relation-building as financial. Up north, simply asking, “really?” is enough to halve the price, and the vendor looks bored the entire time.

Vendor, songtau driver, anyone but a clerk in a department store has ripping you the hell off as a baseline reference point, and if they do defend the price, they do so voraciously and in inverse proportion to the product's worth—if it had any worth at all, you'd know it coming into the transaction, and if you haggled it would be based on some sort of comprehension, so it's a better financial plan to haggle the hell out of it before the rube sees what's on the line.

What boils down, I guess, is that people up here take my ignorance and exploitability for granted, and there's no special accord or recognition if I've figured out how to convey that I'm not quite as farang as I look.

I guess if I broke down and enjoyed it for what it's supposed to be—a paradise of shopping malls and dens of debauchery—it would be easier. But when I'm not much of a mall-crawler at home, why start here in Thailand?