36 Hours in Thailand: Life in the Tuk-Tuk Lane

For the month of July, some classmates and I have planned trips to different places in Southeast Asia each weekend. The great thing about the region is that it’s fairly compact but each country has its own distinct rhythm and flavor to experience and wonders to discover; this makes SE Asia an awesome and easy (and unbelievably inexpensive) place to travel around. The only obstacle for us, with working full-time, is finding cities we can go to on quick weekend trips. After much debate over locations and itineraries (and heartbreak for me…Cambodia will have to wait another 22 years) we landed on three destinations: Bangkok, Thailand; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Manila, The Philippines.

This past weekend, Friday July 3rd – Sunday July 5th, we went to Bangkok for a grand total of 36 hours, and it was inspiring. As we knew it would be when we booked the flight, it was much too short a trip to fit everything in (especially sleep) and only served to whet our appetites for more of Thailand. We now dream of Phuket and Chiang Mai and the Andaman Coast…the more exotic and pristine, less-industrialized areas of the country.

Yet it only took 36 hours in Thailand for me to get the third-world-bug (the good kind, not the stomach kind)…I now have this intense desire to give up on my scholarly and professional American dreams and just live life in some wild, gritty, enchanting corner of the earth and wander from remote village to foreign city – and maybe pick up a lover and a lemur for company along the way.

The preserved culture and character of Thailand is amazing and it’s pervasive under the blanket of westernization happening in major cities like Bangkok. More than exotic and evocative, it was eye-opening. It’s one thing to hear my father talk about what life is like in the rest of the world and it’s a wholly profound experience to see it with my own eyes. Although we stuck to enjoying touristy-delights and achieving sight-seeing-records in the capital city, and even staying in a too-high-end-for-our-own-good luxury hotel, the feel of the city, the smell of the streets, and my interactions with the people of Thailand are what I hope to remember years from now.