Bangkok Bound
Tomorrow we fly from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok. That means we are going from a Muslim state to a Buddhist state (Thailand is 94% Buddhist). Our stay at the Mandarin Oriental here has been very pleasant. The facilities are very nice and the service is excellent. These people know who they serve and as I look up at the ceiling of our room I see another sign of that. There is a small green arrow on the ceiling that is probably unnoticed by most people. It points Northwest and is an aid to Muslims who stay at their hotel and take seriously their devotion to pray to Mecca five times a day.
Tonight we ate at what is billed as a traditional Malaysian restaurant, Madam Kwan’s. One the things I like about our travel crowd is that they are decidedly not foodies who want to overspend on fancy dining. Madam Kwan’s was very basic, with a menu only an American diner goer could love. It was like a Denny’s with everything pictured to make selection more verifiable. The choices ranged from delicious Malay peanut satay to Chinese Kung Pao. Here at the equator, they certainly do like their spiciness, whether to keep the food from spoiling or to induce the sweating necessary to cool off. It was a nice and plentiful meal, all for $12 per person as it turned out. Can’t beat that.
Our dusk tour of Petronas Towers was not the spectacular sunset scene we hoped due to overcast skies, but it was a great way to see the entirety of this ultra-modern city. The towers themselves are amazing architecturally and in construction. Anyone who thinks Malaysians don’t know about modern construction technology hasn’t come for a good look. The stainless steel superstructure alone is a marvel.
Now I want to talk about humidity. Let’s start with a reminder that I grew up in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica. I don’t remember much about the former, but I have many memories of Costa Rica and the little tropical valley in which we lived for two years. I feel like I really do know the tropics and Costa Rica is the spot in the Western Hemisphere that is perhaps closest to being located just north of the equator as Kuala Lumpur is in the Eastern Hemisphere. The thing about the heat and humidity here is that it remains more or less constant throughout the 24-hour cycle, only getting a bit hotter during the midday sun. But the humidity lingers whenever you step outside the air conditioning. We literally had about 100 feet to walk between the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and the entrance to the base mall of the Petronas Tower Complex and yet that was enough to assault our bodies with dripping and stifling heat. It takes everything out of you. You literally sweat out all your essential chemicals so quickly that you are sapped of energy. I simply do not understand how people live in this sort of environment whether it is in Central America, SE Asia or Florida for that matter. When I have nightmares that leave me asking how did I get myself in this place, it is always about being stuck in the tropics.
We are not exactly leaving the tropics as we leave the coast of the Adman Sea and head north across the Gulf of Thailand to Bangkok, but the weather apps are telling me that while the heat is still with us, the humidity as well as the chance of rain seems considerably lower. We will see if it’s a more comfortable heat or not. This is a two-shower per day sort of environment just \to be socially acceptable. What I am most interested in seeing is whether the traffic in Bangkok is any different than I remember it.
In SIngapore, the traffic is light and we learned why when Mike found out that it costs $55,000 to just purchase a permit to buy a car and the purchase price of cars themselves are also high. That does a good job of discouraging too many excess vehicles on the roads. Add that to the Singaporian penchant for strong infrastructure and that adds up to decent and relatively light traffic. In Malaysia, the car availability seems considerably more like we have in the U.S. The road infrastructure reflects Malaysian engineering excellence, but there are certainly more cars and especially more trucks and older cars than you see in SIngapore. But neither SIngapore nor Kuala Lumpur allow small Tuk-Tuks like we are about to see in Bangkok.
I know from living in Rome in the 1960s that a culture that is either trying to move into advanced development or, as was the case in Italy, recover from the devastations of war, goes through a period when transportation availability and affordability has not kept up with transportation demand. And the more capitalistic the economy, the more mass transportation does not fulfill that need, making people turn to two and three wheel transportation. Between bicycles, mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheel Tuk-Tuks and mini-trucks, they swarm in the cities undergoing development. I remember Bangkok from days that were 25-30 years ago which is long enough for a development cycle to change things. I suspect it will be less like India (where two and three wheelers abound) and more like Kuala Lumpur, where there are more cars and simply more traffic than the infrastructure can accommodate. We will see.
For some reason, perhaps deserved, Bangkok has the reputation for SE Asia that Las Vegas has in the United States. In reality, there are plenty of religious and cultural highlights, but it is the crowded, hectic and party side of Bangkok that has gotten all the attention, at least since it was the Rest & Relaxation destination of so many furloughed GIs during the Vietnam War. Bangkok, known locally as Krung Thep, is twice the size of Singapore with over 11 million inhabitants. It has over 22% of the country’s population. That was all driven like so many Asian cities by it being a trading hub that also went on to be the modernization locus for modern Thailand as it transitioned from the traditions of Siam.
Street life dominates the city but is balanced back by cultural sites that include palaces and Buddhist temples like Wat Arjun and Wat Pho. We expect to see it all more in the next few days. It’s haphazard and less regulated control oversight has led to chaotic traffic and extremely inadequate road infrastructure which symbolizes the blend of SE Asian benign socialistic tendencies and rigid and strict legal oversight of the behavior of its people. It is instructive to see Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand in a row and Iook forward to considering how the different blends of socialism and totalitarianism work. In many ways, we in America are less like the places like SIngapore that we admire as visitors and more like the more libertarian places like Thailand that emphasis personal liberty at the expense of avoiding the chaos that it a can all create.
One of the big differentiators between these countries and the U.S. is that home ownership is far more common (90% in SIngapore, 72% in Malaysia and 80%+ in Thailand) compared to home ownership in the U.S. at 66%. One naturally wonders why this is so given the far more advanced mortgage market in the U.S. and the answer is that 85% of housing is built by the government in these countries and then sale is subsidized by the government. All of this and more is awaiting me to ponder as I am Bangkok bound.