| Maximo Park Diary Entries |
| These are diary entries by Maximo Park members from the Official Maximo Park Website. |
Fear and Loathing in Bangkok |
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| 24 Feb, 2006 |
I am writing from Thailand.
The river contains green bamboo shoots and plastic bags tied into bows. We surge past these floaters in our wooden boat with its incongruous grey engine lumped at the back. The river is wide and choppy, making me feel intrepid, especially with our velocity diffusing the Robinson Crusoe heat.
We move past men in grubby vests fiddling with the motors on their boats, blackened liquid gushing into the river. Smaller crafts, paddled along by elderly women, approach us bearing carved figurines of frogs and Buddha. Neil, our tour manager, selects a hat made from smooth bamboo following a swift negotiation. It makes him look like an Asian-style Hunter S. Thompson...
Cupboard-door walls and cobbled-together roofs make up the riverbank residencies, combining strips of pale blues next to tinny greys; anything to keep out the rainfall. Clothes hang limp in the vague, smoggy sunlight, which occasionally blazes into scalding life. Groups of tanned kids stand topless, brandishing slingshots on little jetties that come away from the grassy banks. They carry a range of looks, from defiant to querulous, despite the fact that tourists must skim by on a regular basis.
We stop at an intricate-looking temple built up from small pieces of crockery that have been consistently overlaid and added to, until the effect is like a giant triangular Smarties cake. It is remarkable, in many ways. Close-up, you can see the patterns on the snapped, jagged ceramic bits that once stood as plates on stalls or on shelves in people’s houses; simplistic, painted roses and soft, pink swirls are juxtaposed in a fairly crude way, but the overall balance is serene. Tips of gold glisten from behind buildings on the horizon, but no other construction could better the devotional scene before us now.
In and out of the city, American billboards coat the sides of motorways. One stands empty, its skeleton available for hire. I’d like to put small, innocuous pictures onto these giant hoardings, or maybe some favourite jokes. Bangkok’s skyline has no pattern to it. The giant, silver skyscrapers defining any major international city are scattered all around; lonely clusters rather than a serious, central grouping. I feel sorry for them, or perhaps, I feel sorry that I cannot get to know the city in the way that I have known others. It will remain unconquerable in terms of my limited mental summaries.
When we are in far-flung places, there is always a familiar beginning and end: airports and their deeply unsettling sandwiches...
Paul And The Park |
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