“Keep behind me,” my friend Chantana said as we prepared to manoeuvre our bicycles through the Bangkok rush hour. “Watch for my hand signals. If I wave my left hand, I’m turning left. If I wave my right hand, I’m turning right. If I wave both arms in front of my face, at the same time screaming wildly, there’s a truck coming towards us.”
She didn’t really say that, but peddling out of a quiet side-street and into that barrage of lawless traffic felt positively suicidal. Chantana knew that I cycled at home in England, but I probably failed to mention that I did most of it along the Leeds to Liverpool canal, where the biggest danger was the risk of riding into the back of a fat dog lumbering along the towpath behind its owner.
We appeared to be the only cyclists on the road, which hardly came as a major surprise. The quickest and by far the safest way to get around Bangkok is on the ultra-modern Skytrain. The venerable river ferry runs a close second. Both methods are swift, reliable, traffic-free, and hardly ever involve tripping over a dead dog or being knocked a few feet in the air by a man balancing a box of live fowl on the front of his motorbike. If you are truly insane you might consider putting your life in the hands of a motorcycle taxi. It is undeniably quick – in fact it is not dissimilar to being fired out of a cannon – but carries risks too numerous and gruesome to mention. They say the very last thing you should do is cycle, largely because, well, it may well be the very last thing you do.
For the next ten minutes Chantana pushed her way through a number of knee-knockingly busy road junctions, always checking behind her to make sure that the sleeve of my sweater hadn’t snagged on the wing mirror of an overtaking moped. We eventually stopped in front of a jumble of ramshackle buildings, where an old woman sat in front of a house with a rusty corrogated roof, stitching a garment on an ancient manual sewing machine. She looked up at us without curiosity, smiling a toothless greeting.
“This is a slum area,” Chantana told me. “The people here are very poor but you won’t be in any danger. They are very good people. They will all want to say hello. It would be nice if you could say hello back to them in Thai.”
Riding an expensive mountain bike through one of the poorest slums in Bangkok flies in the face of everything you have been told about staying safe in a foreign country. This is a destitute area of town where amenities are at best basic and the needs of its inhabitants often desperate. There are no shops or businesses other than the open-fronted sweat-shops producing fake designer tee-shirts for the Bangkok markets, no proper roads or pavements, no street lighting, no reassuring tourist police, just ramshackle dwellings and a tangible sense of struggle. It’s the kind of wrong-turn neighbourhood that quietly haunts every tourist in all of the world’s greatest and most unforgiving cities.
Yet there is colour and life and happiness here in abundance. It was impossible to feel intimidated when everyone we passed wanted nothing more than to smile and call out a friendly greeting.
“I told you everyone was nice,” Chantana said proudly. We had now stopped to meet the workers in a sweatshop, a cheerful group of women sitting hunched over sewing machines in the baking heat of a one-room factory unit. A little girl belonging to one of the women came tottering out to greet us. The women began laughing and pointing at me, a reaction I am sadly not unfamiliar with. I looked quizzically at Chantana, who spoke to one of the women before joining in the laughter.
“She says they made the tee-shirt that you’re wearing.”
I stared glumly down at my designer tee-shirt, purchased in good faith that very morning from a man with lots of gold teeth on the Sukhumvit road. His stall was on the road I should say, not his teeth. “Can I ask how much they earn?”
“They can earn more than a lot of regular factory workers,” Chantana told me. “But it’s piece work, and the rate is low, and so in order to do so they must work extremely hard.”
We watched them for a few moments. It was thirty-five degrees and just standing here watching them was exhausting. I couldn’t imagine how tortuous it must be to spend hour after hour bent over one of those sewing machines, your fingers hot and stiff and a blazing knot of pain between your shoulder blades. I was sure I would be weeping, not laughing and gently teasing gormless tourists.
We finished the tour of the slums with a meal of Pad Thai – a favourite Thai dish of noodles served with meat or fish – at an open-air café beside Chao Phraya river. Later we pushed our bikes to the edge of the pier to await the long-tailed boat that would take us to Ko Kret.
"Here you will see very little white people," Chantana told me. For a moment I was speechless with excitement. I imagined an island of tiny humans, just like Lilliput, where I would rule as king.
I felt a tug on my sleeve. "I meant very few white people, of course."
"Of course," I said, just a little deflated.
We loaded our bikes into a long-tail boat and departed for the short hop to the island. Ko Kret is a popular weekend retreat for Thais but is surprisingly overlooked by most western tourists. Just why is a mystery. The island has one of the loveliest parks in Bangkok, with miles of cycling track winding through the sort of lush, tropical scrub you would not expect to find this close to the city, and a large pond teaming with fish.
We met a stray dog called Spot who lives in the park and greeted our arrival in a manner that suggested one of us was now expected to produce a juicy bone. Instead Chantana gave me a bag of fish pellets.
“Throw them,” she said with a secretive little smile. So I did, and Chantana’s smile dimmed at once. “Not at the dog, you fool. Throw them in the pond.”
At once the surface of the pond began to broil as hundreds of fish burst up and snapped greedily at the pellets. Spot gazed at this mass of seething sushi with a kind of dumfounded rapture before bounding into the water with its own jaws snapping.
“Sometimes she catches a fish,” Chantana said, smiling. She looked at me and shrugged lightly. “Sometimes not.”
Just as it was for those living a hand-to-mouth existence in the slums we had just ridden through. I tried to imagine what my reaction would have been had I flopped into the hotel restaurant this morning to be told, “Sometimes there is breakfast, today there is not.” Having tried the scrambled eggs, which slopped onto my plate like something sneezed out by a sick pony, it might not have been such a bad thing. Still, it is nice to have the choice.
