Days 65 – 67: Bangkok

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2052288&l=e5b31&id=1101094

We spent Sunday morning in Bangkok asking around about Myanmar visas. We checked out all the travel agencies, asking whether they could get us visas when the embassy opened on Monday morning. The travel agents’ faces soured when we said we wanted to go to Myanmar (“Myanmar? Why you want go there?), and then, when they asked us where we were from, they repeated, wide-eyed, “USA?”

“No, no, can’t do,” they said firmly. “Countries mad each other,” and smashed their fists together to illustrate their point. It seems that if we were to get visas to enter Myanmar, we would have to get them ourselves. The embassy opened at 9am the following morning, so we planned to be there by 8 to wait in line.

We spent the rest of the day running errands around the Bangkok metropolis, which was by no means pleasant. The heat, the traffic, and the smog combine to make Bangkok a somewhat miserable place in which to exist. But I managed to pick up new headphones for my iPod (mine had broken back in Bali) and a microphone for Skype (finally, cheap phone calls), and afterward we headed back to our hotel for some much-needed R&R.

The following morning we got to the Myanmar embassy at 8am, as planned, and when the embassy doors opened at 9 we were first in line for visas. The only problem was that the embassy had stopped processing visas—all requests were now being sent back to Yangon for approval. Given the events of the past month (the monks’ protest and subsequent government crackdown, in case you’ve been living in a hole, or only watching Fox News), that wasn’t really surprising. Instead of the usual 1-2 days processing time, we’d now have to wait 1-2 weeks, which really put a damper on our plans to visit Burma considering we both had plans to leave the region in two weeks. But we figured there was no harm in trying anyway, so we filled out the requisite paperwork and attempted to submit our visa request.

Not so fast. Kendyl needed extra pages in her passport, and I needed proof that I was actually employed by Morgan Stanley (because otherwise I could be a… journalist, right? Perhaps, although Kendyl, the actual journalist in our party, simply showed her old University of British Columbia ID and that seemed to be enough to convince them that she was a graduate student of English). I hadn’t brought along any business cards, and my corporate ID didn’t even have Morgan Stanley’s name on it (I still don’t understand that one), so I ended up showing my health insurance card, which had “Morgan Stanley” printed in the corner. The man seemed skeptical, but he finally said “OK,” and we were off to the American embassy to get Kendyl some new passport pages.

The trip to the American embassy proved providential, as we met a man named Brian Laguardia who had NGO connections throughout the region. He set us up with folks in Chiang Mai who set us up with folks in Mae Sot (on the Thai/Burmese border) who eventually set us up with folks in Burma. Had we not met Brian, our eventual Burma trip would have been far less successful. But at the time, all we could think about was how annoyed we were that we had to wait two weeks to enter the country.

We planned to meet up with Brian later that evening, and then we returned to the Myanmar embassy to submit our forms. We wrote down our cell phone number, and the man behind the counter promised that we would receive a phone call when our visas were ready. Naively, we believed him.

We spent the afternoon at our hotel’s rooftop pool. For me, the place was a real gem—we were paying something like $10 a night for a clean hotel with a rooftop pool, and I could even leech free Wi-Fi in the room. For Kendyl, the place was a hellhole—in three nights, she ended up with something like 100 bedbug bites.

Why did we stay in a place with bedbugs for three nights, you might reasonably ask? Well, at first we just thought they were mosquitoes. And mosquitoes had always liked Kendyl’s blood more than mine, so it wasn’t surprising that we woke up to a bitten Kendyl and a bite-free me. By the time we realized that it was bedbugs, and that they, also, preferred Kendyl’s blood to my own, it was too late. Kendyl was covered in huge, red bites that remained far longer than those dealt by mosquitoes.

The only other thing notable about our stay in Bangkok was that my iPod died. I’d had it for over three years, so I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised, but even so I was devastated. Sure, I hadn’t technically lost anything—all the music on my iPod was also on my Dell laptop—but that laptop was in California. I would spend the rest of the trip listening to two albums—Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger, courtesy of Kendyl’s laptop, and Radiohead – In Rainbows, courtesy of an ingenious online distribution effort by the British rockers. I paid £5 for the album. I think that was too much.