Thailand

Like any middle-income country, Thailand has very high income and wealth inequality. This is also expressed geographically. Bangkok has about 15% of the population and 90% of the wealth of the country. So, like all cities in the history of civilisation, Bangkok is richer than the country surrounding it.

So let’s guess that Bangkok has income per head of $15,000 compared to the Thai average $8,000 (purchasing power parity basis, from the CIA website). Even allowing for the large regional income disparities in Italy (income per head $30,000-35,000), Bangkok should be poorer than, say, Naples.

No doubt it is, if you look at the proportion of households with fridges, for example. But (central) Bangkok seems much richer than (central) Naples.

This is partly due to the relative absence of visible poverty. The number of beggars is also about the same as in London, for example.

It also has plenty to do with rubbish: littering is an offence in Bangkok and a norm in Naples. In Bangkok, an army of street cleaners sweeps the streets; in Naples the Camorra dumps the nation’s spazzatura on to the streets.

Thirdly, it has something to do with the building stock. Most edifices in Naples appear decayed and there’s little completed new build, in the centre at least. Buildings, shacks apart, don’t appear decayed in Bangkok, and all the tall buildings - of which there are many - have sprouted in the last 20 years.

As usual, I don’t know whether to give to beggars or not. You get feelgood (and Buddhist merit) by giving. On the other hand, unemployment is officially 2% in Thailand and there are plenty of economic niches available: selling lottery tickets, for example. Furthermore, children are trafficked from Cambodia to be put to begging here. They don’t get to keep their revenues.

This is a photo of a lampshade stall on Soi Rambuttri. It's not much to the point, but I really like it.

On Monday I moved about 3 miles west from Siam Square to Banglamphu, the backpacker centre of Southeast Asia. Banglamphu is attractive and repellent. Repellent, because it’s entirely full of westerners and locals catering to backpackers’ needs (perhaps not every need – Soi Cowboy off Thanon Sukhumvit is where westerners have gone to pay for sex since a joint servicing GIs opened in the Vietnam War). It’s a neon city, selling cheap clothes, massages and all kinds of food and drink.

All the bars have televisions showing a Hollywood movie or European or British football. Banglamphu has nothing to do with Thai culture. And I don’t particularly want to be tattooed, have my hair braided, have a facial of any kind or knit my own cereal.

On the other hand, I wrote this while drinking a beer in a bar playing acceptable low-key western dance music; and after five days of rice for breakfast, lunch and supper it was a welcome toss-up between a pizza and some kosher food. The pizza won. It was bad, but at least it wasn’t made from a variety of grass.

Furthermore, not least wherever the Chinese have settled - which is almost everywhere - there have always been foreign enclaves. The name we foreigners give the Thai capital city comes from the name Chinese traders gave to their village on the banks of the Chao Praya. Bangkok meant something to do with plum trees. When General Thaksin moved his capital from ruined Ayutthiya, in the eighteenth century, he moved it to Thonburi on the west bank. His successor Rama I moved it across the river to Rattanakosin and renamed it Krung Thep, City of Angels. That is the abbreviated form: the full name has another 100 syllables. Large parts of Thailand have in the past been controlled by regional powers from what are now Burma, Laos and Cambodia, as well as controlling in their turn Laos, Cambodia and much of Malaysia. There have been Burmese and Lao here for a long time. So the 'authentic' Thai Bangkok has never existed. Khao San Road is just the 21st century version.

The beer, by the way, is ordinary. This is a problem, because I haven’t had a drop of wine since trying to drown out sociopathic-Frenchmen-induced sorrows on the flight. Neither Singha nor Chang are dry enough. This is more noticeable at the bottom of the glass: it’s probably 28 degrees right now and my dregs are warm. Leo is just about acceptable. Lao Beer is supposed to be the best in the scrotum of Southeast Asia (er, is there a better term for the Indochinese bulge?), so that is a reason to look forward to Luang Prabang.

Many of the customers’ faces are East Asian. I think I remember reading that the largest source of tourists in Thailand is Japan, and it would not be surprising given their population, income and propensity to travel. There are also an increasing number of Indians, so the standard of cricket is bound to be rising (there are some cricket matches in Bangkok). But second to the Japanese, I think, are the Brits - about 750,000 of us last year. But the angrit (apologies to Celtic nations, but the term is inclusive) are only about a quarter of the Europeans here, and I have heard plenty of German, French and Dutch, and some Danish, Finnish, Russian and Italian. We are all farang. As in the Middle East, we are all associated with a Germanic tribe that took over a small part of what is now France in the fifth century AD. Their leader was called Clovis and he is traditionally counted the first king of France.

The traditional Thai salve/vale/mea culpa is the wai, made by placing the palms together in front of the thorax with the fingers pointing skyward. (The same gesture is a nop in Laos.) A small accompanying bow seems to be common, although not obligatory. Change the height of the hands and it changes the status of the wai: there's the rub.

It’s charming to be waied after a short conversation or transaction (I may sound all memsahib, but it really is the most charming greeting gesture I can think of). While in the retail paradise of Siam Square, I didn’t generally respond, usually because I had my hands full. But the guidebooks say you should reciprocate. More recently I have responded; it has felt a little forced and I’ve got it over with as quickly as possible. But it gets a little easier.

I have taken an absurd number of photos of roofs (rooves? Tolkien says dwarves, I recall [but that's because he was an expert in Old English, and the f in words like hlaf (loaf) was unvoiced in the singular and voiced in the plural; hence our modern confusion) in Bangkok. It is the shape of the roofs that makes traditional Thai buildings distinctive. Your average ubosot/bot is wooden, has a rectangular or subtly boat-shaped plan, a tiled Swiss-pitched roof (or overlapping roofs, like the armour of an armadillo or a Roman legionary) and thick square columns.

As an example, take the Buddhaisawan Chapel in the grounds of the National Museum, which holds the second-holiest Buddha in the kingdom:

What strikes the eye is the adornment to the the roofs at the corners of the gables and the eaves. At the end of each roof is a cho fa (sky tassel) finial. These look like stylised birds, and so they may be: eg Garudas, guardian bird spirits in Thailand (originally singular, and the mount of Vishnu). Often the bird could be interpreted to be grasping a naga (chief serpent demon type, traditional enemy of Garuda, again borrowed from India via Cambodia), whose tail appears as a finial lower down. But the same shape also sometimes appears as a finial without a snake attached. And the meaning of the shapes is a mystery. There is a style called swan's tail, which apparently adorns boats and barges: not being a devotee of poultry arse, I don't know what it looks like. So the taxonomy is incomplete: further research is needed. My next stamp collecting-exercise.

In any case, it is the finials - which the Thais sensibly copied from the Khmer Cambodians - that add elegance, curvature and lightness to the edifices. So here are some photos.

In the National Museum:

In Wat Phra Kaeow, the royal wat that is home to the Emerald Buddha:

Nearly twenty years ago I had dinner in Pucallpa, in the Peruvian Amazon. I swallowed a mouthful of something lava-hot, and within a minute sweat was dripping off the end of my nose. The waiter said the offending chilli was called an ají, and it was the hottest I have ever had. That’s the first time I can remember flowing rather than glowing.

Here I’ve been happy to be not too obnoxious, literally speaking. While more blubbery farang have been red and dripping, I haven’t been sweating at all. But then, it hasn’t been hot by local standards. That changed last night, when it rained. After a short shower, the humidity just went through the roof. At the same time I managed to get lost, and splashed through dark side streets taking a long cut. By the time I got back to the Skytrain twenty minutes later, I’d sublimed through mere moistness and was dripping from forehead and neck. It was not a good look, and to Thai noses I probably smelt like a durian. And in this humidity, once it’s started it doesn’t stop. So I went for a curry.