First Hour in Krung Thep

The fragrance of fried garlic, pork and raw fish, mix with the smell of the canal; and a whiff of sewer floats in the air. It is early morning, but the industrial Thai are already setting up market along the narrow alley, across the canal from our hotel.
 
We cross the bridge and and walk through the shaded alley, taking in the aroma. Opulent vegetation creeps over the walls and oozes through the fences. Cats roam through their own ground-level labyrinth. At a table eating breakfast sits a Buddhist monk dressed in orange robes. A crew of five in yellow shirts float the canal on a small boat and use a long pole with a net on the end to fish trash from the water.
 

We come up the stairs from the canal and find a cacophony of motorist traffic, with horns and spewing exhaust. The buildings are dingy with soot. Electrical wires seem to stretch everywhere.
 
We pass many stalls already selling food. One sells freshly-squeezed orange juice and another fresh fruit. We only have large bills and end up buying a drink at the 7-11.
 
Even at this morning hour, Khao San Road is full of people. We quickly learn the aggressiveness of the Thai. Every twenty feet we have men look at us and ask, “Tuk-tuk?” I shake hands with three swarthy individuals, all of them seeking my business. One of the drivers asks my name, and then Jenelle's. She says, “Sue.” He marches us for two blocks to the tourism office, where we sit down with a salesman who tries to sell an excursion package. We politely tell him that we don't wish to make a decision now. I'm sure the tuk-tuk driver gets a cut for anyone he can drag in.
 

Finally we make our escape back to the street and find that the heat is turning up. Abruptly, the food stalls end, and after passing over a small canal lined with trees and pink flowers, I pull out a map and we reorient our course. We pass temples of unknown names and homeless people lying on the sidewalk. A man sits on a plastic chair and reads the paper in front of a colorful wall of dragon graffiti. We see red buses that look thirty years old, with windows down and dripping with people. Two rats, the size of a shoe, crawl along the curb.
 
Needing to eat, we find a lone vendor who sells skewers of meat for 10-20 baht. The 10 baht skewers look like chunks of lung, and the 20, chicken. He, nor his wife, speak English, other than to say “ten” and “twenty,” and “chicken” and “rice.” He also sells something rolled in a banana leaf, which we wish to buy, but they don't understand and we leave it at that, only buying skewers of chicken and sticky rice in a bag.
 

We find a park with a bench where we can sit down and eat. The park is relatively quiet compared to the chaos of the city. Flowers bloom, birds play on the grass, and the trees look like gnarled lengths of yarn.
 
We use our fingers for the sticky rice, and wish we had brought hand-sanitizer. Mine comes with a pasty hot sauce that has a hint of curry, leaving my eyes watering. On our way out, we stop at another vendor and buy a bag of pineapple and melon. Everything here seems to come in bags. He can't speak English, and likes talking to himself.
 
As we walk toward the southern entrance of the sanctuary, a tuk-tuk driver looks at us, asks where we are going, and then says, “This way,” pointing north. So we turn around, but quickly encounter another driver who asks the same question, but points the other way! We ignore both and decide to follow our intuition. Five minutes later we find our destination—Wat Pho. ♠