YES, SIAM!

An exploration of central Thailand reveals a cornucopia of cultural, historical, environmental and gastronomical experiences

- BRUCE DENNILL

Arriving in Bangkok, as in any large city, you’d expect layers – of history, culture, and society; a hodge-podge of architectural styles sculpting the skyline. The Thai capital has all of those, but it also has actual tiers. Driving into the city from the Suvarnabhumi Airport and arriving in the popular Pathum Wan District, where you find many of the large shopping malls, including the tourist favorite MBK Center, you enter a brutalist spider web of elevated highways and Skytrain (what most of the locals seem to call the Bangkok Mass Transit System, a rail network another level up from the raised highway) towering above the ground level tarmac. And below that, there is an underground train system (the Metropolitan Rapid Transit system), and a network of canals on which water buses kick up swelling wakes as they motor back and forth.

All of these channels are needed because Bangkok has a lot of people – the 2019 figures have the population at over 16 million – needing to get to a lot of places, many of them in cars or on motorcycles (another massive figure – around 9.7 million locals own a vehicle of some sort). If you’re on foot, then, it’s not a bad idea to stay off the road surface: taking on too many cars in multiple lanes can otherwise make you the hero in a computer-game style endeavor where you, unfortunately, don’t get extra lives. In fact, the received wisdom here is “Watch the cars; don’t expect them to watch you”.