Shifting Gears

After ten weeks in New Zealand and Australia, Bangkok was an assault on the senses. I mean that in the best possible way.

Big, chaotic, confusing and a bit intimidating — it was just what we were looking for after the ease of Oz.  We loved Australia, but we had grown soft there, losing the hard-earned “travelers’ edge” we had acquired in South America.

We arrived at Bangkok’s ultra-modern Survarnabhumi Airport, one of South East Asia’s busiest, and home to the third largest airport terminal in the world.

Suvarnabhumi made headlines round the world in late 2008 when the People’s Alliance for Democracy blockaded and seized the airport, demanding the resignation of the government of Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat.

All flights to and from the airport were canceled for nearly a week, leaving hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded.

The protests gave us pause (particularly as portrayed by CNN), and we briefly considered not traveling to Thailand.

But as the weeks passed, it became apparent that our concerns were overblown. The standoff at the airport had been tense, but the country itself was not a dangerous place for visitors.

A little history helps put the recent protests in context.

Siam, as the Portuguese named the country in 1511, had existed as an independent absolute monarchy for centuries.  In 1932 wealthy educated elites mounted a successful coup against the idea of an absolute monarchy.

This bloodless revolution led to the creation of a constitutional monarchy (similar to the United Kingdom), that left a mixed military-civilian group in power.  The new government changed the country’s western name from Siam to Thailand, which, loosely translated, means “Land of the Free.”

Since the 1932 coup there have been at least 17 additional coups.  Few have resulted in bloodshed or civil unrest, and in most cases the coup has been orchestrated by a faction within the country’s ruling elite.

By the time we arrived in early January, all operations at the airport had returned to normal, and everyone we encountered was acting as if the protests had never happened.

As we headed into town, the first fifteen minutes of our taxi ride was made at light speed.  But when we exited the freeway we got an immediate taste of Bangkok’s legendary traffic congestion.  It took nearly an hour to travel the two miles from the freeway exit to our guest house.

We were new to Asia, and the menagerie of brightly colored taxis, tuk-tuks, motorbikes, vendor carts (along with the occasional elephant) kept us entertained as we crept along Sukhamvit Road.

Clearly, we were not in Australia anymore.