Before I leave Chengdu, I must mention the pandas. I had no expectation of liking them at all. I like to take day trips that get me into the countryside or to another village, so I took the panda tour. But I did love the pandas and their park-surroundings. It was one of those places with flag waving guides followed by hordes spilling from large busses, but that was unavoidable. The heaviest bamboo forest I ever encountered made the crowds seemed less troublesome and noisy.
There are nearly a couple hundred pandas in this vast enclosure of which only a handful are on display as they come out to eat their breakfast of about a ton of bamboo. Of the huge amount each one eats daily, only 2% is digested as protein and the rest goes right back out as fibre waste. We had to watch a film ("had to" this is China - You WILL watch our film) which said that male pandas have a very difficult time finding a suitable partner and often take many years to do so (hmm, that seems familiar somehow). Once a partner is found, sexual congress is hardly assurred. Should it happen so successfully that Mrs. is with child, the situation barely improves. Many panda moms have little or no idea of what to do with the kid and it dies. It is probably the most helpless mammal I have ever seen - tiny and naked and cannot even stand up for six months. The prognosis of the "experts" on the film ws essentially that this is a species failure in the Darwinian sense, but you have to wonder then why they flourished for several million years before this failure. While I was there, they had one cub in a human incubator and two in a nursery inside of a human baby crib. It was all terribly beautiful and terribly sad and hopeless and full of hope.
I flew on to Bangkok, a place I have little use for. I went there on business a couple of times, on pleasure once, and stayed in the suburbs twice. I think the traffic in midtown is in the same place it was the last time I was there several years ago. Traffic stands still there as tho ossified.
The air is less dirty than it was even a decade ago, altho I am not sure why. They keep building beautiful high rise condos and office buildings but the sidewalks remain broken, everything is broken or crowded or smelly. It is a giant flea market. I divide visitors to Bangkok into the higher income - who are shoppers - and the low income who are losers. There is more crap for sale in Bangkok than any place in the world, and right now as you read this, there are western women pawing thru some streetside stand looking at the 6,000th purse this week, and 85,000th T-shirt, and 3,875th pair of flip flops that are probably the 34th pair she owns. The sidewalks are probably kind of a standard width, but in the early afternoons, vendors set up their stalls and take up most of the sidewalk, which later have fat butts sticking out bent over from looking into the crap for sale in the stalls. It is hot like the upper level of Hell with maximum humidity, the sidewalks are packed, six guys are chasing you to buy a tour, a watch, a free dinner, a cruise on the river and an engagement with an elephant who wants to meet you, and you are stuck behind some fat butt bent over looking at jewelled flip flops on sale today only. I liked Chang Mai and Chang Rai, but Bangkok is a hole.
To prove it, a small hotel near the one I stayed at has a restaurant with a big photographic sign out front offering the new wildly successful cuisine - that's what their sign says anyway. It is a Doughnut cheeseburger. A big doughnut sliced liked a bagel with a whopping burger and cheese, and mustard or ketchup in the middle, and incredibly, two olives on a toothpick on top. You can't make up this sort of thing. It was for real.
I was settled in an odd, but new, arab hotel which was clean, comfortable and odd. It was near the giant hospital in Bkk which is huge and renowned and is the one the old King is taken to occasionally. It seems some arab nations send a lot of patients to Bkk for treatment and if the number of eye patches I saw around indicates anything, they do a lot of eye surgery. Every airline magazine and billboards coming in from the airport advertised the new hit - medical tourism - get something taken off, reduced, pumped up or added to your old body while you are in town - please.
I had thought I should fly to Calcutta and resume my planned trip Westward across India. But I had been reading of Kerala for along time and decided to go to the southwest tip of India instead. That meant finding a flight to Chennai - which was formerly Madras- and then on to Fort Cochin. The streets of Bkk are packed, and I mean store-to-store with travel agents. But they know nothing - none of them even heard of Chennai, most barely knew of India. When I finally led them thorough the basics (in some cases I just gave up and left hoping to find some intelligent agent -which was a complete failure), they had no idea of anything and as good modern robots just got on the phone and computer to have them tell the robot what to do next.
One agent could generate a ticket after many phone calls, but said that I must have an onward ticket out of India or immigration would not allow me in and I could not get on the flight out of BKK. I said I intended not to obey that and write the ticket anyway. She would not. So I asked for the address of Air India and asked how to use the skytrain (which was a joy),and I went directly to Air India.
When I got there, the phones were ringing non-stop. It was so bad that the employees would not answer the phones because as fast as they set down the received another call came and they could not complete any of their work. I could see it all at once. I asked the agent I was with "Are they all phone calls from those amateur travel agents out on the streets who have no idea of what they are doing?" He sighed, and said "yes, non-stop every minute all day they are calling for everything they ought to know being in the business." We dispensed with the onward ticket problem immediately as he said "if you have $100 cash and some credit cards, there is no problem." I joked "And I am old and white." He laughed and said "That's it for sure."
By and by, the welcome evening came that I boarded a Thai air code share with Air India and flew on to Chennai where the annual monsoon was just waiting for this old white guy to arrive.
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