WHEN the tourist brochures describe Bangkok in Thailand as the most exciting city in the world, they neglect to mention the possibility of civil wars breaking out while you are paying a visit. 
 

But even now back home, watching scenes on television of unfolding mayhem in streets that a few short days ago I was strolling along, I feel that the gunbattles between anti-government protesters and Thai police wouldn’t really interfere much with a tour of the Grand Palace.  It would just add some further spice to the sensory overload that is the city of Bangkok. I did actually get involved in these anti-government protests, although I did not know it at the time.  I had been exploring the streets in the centre of town when I came across a large ornate building that seemed to be en fete.  I wandered through the gates and through throngs of people sitting around listening to various speakers haranguing them.  There were myriad stalls selling fragrant snack-a-bit type foods, and plastic clappers that the crowd was using to applaud the speakers.  The whole place was like a carnival.  It was only much later, when I spoke to a rare English-speaking Thai and asked him what was going on, that I learned that I had been consorting with plotters and planners.  And buying souvenirs from them too, it seems. But I am getting ahead of myself.  To go back to the beginning….last week I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Bangkok when a few unexpectedly work-free days fell into my lap.  Bangkok was an obvious choice at short notice because it is cheap, easy to organise and you do not need a visa.  (These visas, by the way, are becoming a tool by which countries tell you they don’t want you to visit.  To go to the US, you have to have been nominated for at least one Nobel prize and have documentary proof that no family ancestor has ever visited a hot sandy country with the possible exception of Namibia.  To get into France you must visit the Consulate personally, sing all 108 verses of the Marseillaise and spell ‘guillotine’…. but I digress.) Arriving at the cavernous Suvarnabhumi airport, you could be in any echoing terminal in the world, until you meet up with the giant (and I mean giant – they must be about 10 metres high) figures of demons in typical grimacing and bow-legged poses.  They line your entrance route, and remind you that you have now arrived in the inscrutable East.  Because,despite their strange colouring and their fearsome aspect, demons in the east are actually the good guys. Welcome to Siam! Apart from the Dragon Gate as you leave the airport, the road to downtown Bangkok could be the Johannesburg M1 – albeit with funny writing on the signboards.  It is only when you get closer to the teeming city of 10 million people that you realise that you are now in a very unusual place indeed. There is no picture, no documentary, no photograph, that can prepare you for the over-heated human antheap that is Bangkok. I got lost on my first foray out of the hotel on the night I arrived.  This is actually becoming quite usual, and happens every time I set foot out the country.  It was nine pm on a Saturday night, and I spent several hours wandering the thronged streets, sampling food from the stalls, eyeing the candled and flowered and incensed shrines to Buddha on the street corners, perusing an eye-popping array of goods on sale and exchanging cordial greetings with Thai stallholders (In retrospect, I wonder what on earth we were saying to each other…).  The narrow pavements and alleys were lit like Christmas trees, bath-tub-sized pots of pale lotus flowers gleamed, there was noise and light and the smell of cooking food and a myriad other things.  It seemed Asia’s population was on the street that night. My first meal in Thailand was a street-stall collection of skewered meatballs with spicy sauce, sweet potato and coconut milk, dished up cheerfully with bare hands in a manner that would make any reasonably diligent health inspector keel over in a dead faint.  But the memory of a first taste of the unusual cuisine that makes up Thai street food is enough to make my stomach sit up and beg. It was only when the lights began to go out, and the stall-holders started to thin as they packed up their goods and wheeled them off into the night that I realized that I had no idea which way my lodgings lay.  It took a bit of blundering, a lot of sign language, and a great deal of mis-pronunciation, but eventually I got back to the haven of the hotel.  Those first few hours in Bangkok on their own would have given me enough of an adrenalin rush to make the entire trip worthwhile, but more was in store. And that will have to wait for next week…