This commute could kill me, if I’m not careful. Scurrying like a madman through the streets of Bangkok is simply not safe – the pavement is uneven, there’s jackasses on motorbikes randomly driving down the sidewalks, and everywhere, food stands and hawkers and fumes satiate your senses till your head starts spinning. This city doesn’t feel particularly pedestrian-friendly, but maybe that’s just because I keep getting lost…
Sitting at the airport after a stressful, 90-minute race against the clock to make my flight, I find myself contemplating the contract I’ve signed. Spending two days a week in Leo Burnett’s Bangkok office was a clause I agreed upon reluctantly, because my new boss demanded it, but I knew at the time it was going to hurt. Bangkok may only be an hour-long flight from Chiang Mai, but it’s 4-5 hours from my house to my new office, door to door, and the transition from the mountainous serenity of northern Thailand to the hustle and bustle of the big city is difficult. Maybe I’m just not mentally prepared for it, and it will get easier with practice, but after doing this for two weeks in a row I can honestly say that this commute is a beast. I’m used to 15 hour flights and 30 hours of travel to cross the world, but navigating Thai traffic is a whole different proposition. Plus, part of the problem is I know this is inefficient. In this day and age, where I can legitimately get more work done in a coffee shop than at the office, there isn’t necessarily a good rationale for traveling 500 miles to a place of business just to show my face. Truth be told, though, I do realize that the work I just did over the last 30 hours was not something I could have produced from Chiang Mai. Sigh. You can’t pour yourself into a new business pitch from some remote outpost, you actually have to get your hands dirty and put in the long nights, surrounded by a team suffering through the same ordeal. I just wish the transitions to and from the office weren’t quite so brutal…
This trip to Bangkok hurt pretty bad. Got up at 4:45 am, was out the door at 5:10, boarded the plane at 6:30, landed at 8:15, took two trains into the city, walked a few long, torturous blocks to the office, and hit the ground running on a new business pitch that kept me at the office till 11 pm. They fed me good, but by 11 pm, I was ready to leave. I finished up a script, grabbed my suitcase and computer, and walked through the steady rain trying to find the hotel I’d booked online. Got lost twice, because my iPhone GPS was wrong, the google maps location of this hotel was inaccurate, and in the dark I got disoriented. I’ve learned the hard way over the past two weeks not to trust online maps to gauge distances in this city. Something that’s 1000 meters as the crow flies might take an hour to walk, through buildings, over streets, around parks and beneath highway overpasses. It’ll get easier once I know the geography of this city, but for now, I’m perpetually wandering around like a befuddled farang.
Finally arrived at the hotel around midnight. The receptionist in the abandoned lobby retreated back to the office and told me she didn’t have my reservation. Lovely. Rain soaked and irritated, I waited for 30 minutes as she laboriously ran through a bunch of databases and still came up empty. It would have been one thing if she was apologetic, but this was service with a scowl, entirely lacking the gracious, warm hospitality Thai’s are renowned for all over the world. Hotels.com gave this place a 3.8 rating out of 4, but I could tell just by the abandoned lobby that this was not a place I would be coming back to. The receptionist ultimately gave me a room, apologized, and had someone escort me up. Great, I thought. Just let me shower and pass out. Ah, but if it were only that simple.
I am not a hotel snob. I’ve stayed in some amazing places for work over the years, but I’ve also been through my share of backpacker joints and hostels over the years. I’m not proud, and there’s something to be said for traveling on a shoestring budget – it’s an adventure. That said, I have never stayed in a room as crappy as the one I found myself in last night. Upon entering it, I was hit with the stench of old cigarette smoke ingrained into the fabric of the carpet, seemingly infused into the curtains and the walls themselves. The paint was dingy, the bedding was suspect, and the bathroom had the kind of scratchy, grey towels that made you wonder if they might have been white in a previous life. Still, exhausted as I was, I just brushed my teeth and got ready to pass out. Unfortunately, I could tell that this was not a room I was going to get much sleep in.
I was tucked under the covers, smothered by the stench of old cigarettes, desperately trying to go to sleep when I felt what seemed to be a bug bite on my leg. Turned the lights on, shucked the blanket off the bed and took a good look at what I was lying on. It wasn’t pretty. Cranked up the internet and ran a google search for “signs of bed bugs.” While the bed I was in didn’t appear to be infested, there were traces… leavings… markings… Now paranoid along with exhausted, I spent an hour trying to figure out how to deal with the bed I was in, and eventually drifted off into an uneasy sleep, without sheets or covers. Sigh. Live and learn, I guess.
I woke in the morning and things looked better in the light of day. Ate a decent breakfast, checked out, and walked back to the office to put it another long day of pitch-preparation. I suppose I’m destined to learn some things the hard way out here, as so many travelers are wont to do. Things I learned on this trip? There’s quite a difference between a $35 hotel room in Bangkok and one priced at $42. The airport express train can trim 400 baht and an hour off a one-way trip to Suvarnabhumi from the city center. And lastly, I learned once again that everything looks better once you land back in Chiang Mai and find yourself in a quiet taxi on a largely empty road, headed back to your loving wife and excited puppy. The commute seems doable once it’s over, but when it’s happening, it hurts on a lot of different levels. I guess I better get used to it. There’s work waiting for me in Bangkok…
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