"I hate New York," spat the fat old red-faced German squatting next to me. "I was there once. Once!" He raised his voice and his index finger. "For three hours. In 1984. Ach, I hated it."
I love the great cities, New York most of all. I love quiet little towns and villages. All the rest, the mid-size towns, the suburbs and exurbs, the provincial capitals, the regional hubs, the world centers of whistle-making, even the fast-growing, awkward adolescent metropolises that may one day seduce me, can all go to hell.
So I do not like you Chiang Mai, you mid-size town, you capital of northern Thailand, you regional center of wood-carving. I much prefer Bangkok.
This is interesting, because so many people had told me to expect the opposite. Chiang Mai is charming, restful, and picturesque, they said, while Bangkok is crowded, frenetic, and ugly.
True, but irrelevant.
Now perhaps I like small towns and villages because they are charming and restful and picturesque. Or perhaps it’s because I am genetically predisposed towards communities of no more than 120 people, the maximum size of a human settlement for all but the last ten thousand of our two million years on earth, and I cannot escape my nature.
Like monotheistic religions, bottle-feeding, and apple pie, but unlike homosexuality and drug use, cities are unnatural. So the love of cities can only be acquired and transmitted culturally. But that happens quite naturally, so to speak, because since Mesopotamia great cultures have been centred on great cities.
Bangkok has some of these qualities. The Temple of the Emerald Buddha and Wat Pho would grace any city, and the less famous Vimanmek Palace is of all the palaces that I have seen, hypothetically, the one that I would most like to live in.
I love the layout of Bangkok. Radiating out from the old heart of the city are a dozen or so arterial roads that branch and divide into a network of fine alleys, almost all of them dead-ends. The narrow streets and lack of through traffic mean that Bangkok is made up of hundreds of little villages, some very quiet, each no more than a few hundred feet from a main road. It’s very confusing for the first-time visitor, but for this branching topology Bangkok has adopted a recursive address system, as logical as New York’s grid and much more flexible. A marvellous monorail runs east-west high above the city, and the central shopping area is linked by skywalks at the same level. If there’s anything in the world that you want to buy, you can walk from one soaring mall to the next for several miles without ever descending to street level.
I loved taking a river taxi along the Chao Phraya, the river that marks the western boundary of Bangkok. The Hudson and the Thames have retired to riverside parks and receational boating, but the Chao Phraya still works for a living. River taxis are the best way to travel north or south, and there are many more warehouses than warehouse conversions. In the alleys along the waterfront there are dozens of small businesses with jerry-built piers.
Thailand is a vibrant democracy - notwithstanding the strange status of the royal family and the authoritarian style of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra - and Bangkok is the center of that democracy. One hundred thousand people gathered here peacefully last week to demand Thaksin’s resignation. At a time when people elsewhere are rioting over cartoons, both the respect for free speech and the respectful way in which that right was exercised were an example to the world.
Yet I do not really love Bangkok. Most of the construction in the last twenty years has been haphazard and ugly, concrete boxes in the center and strip malls at the edges. The Chao Phraya is filthy and the canals - this city was once called the Venice of the East - are rimmed with slums and stink so badly that people travelling on them wear facemasks. And there is terrible poverty here, whole slum towns under some of the bridges.
But twenty years ago the Thames was biologically dead; now whales get lost in it. Twenty years ago New York was a dangerous place to live; now it’s the safest big town in America. Twenty years ago Thailand was still a third-world country; now it is a middle-income country. One day it will be rich, and one day the people of Bangkok, casting about for things to do with their money, will reclaim their river and canals and their architectural heritage, and throw great new buildings into the sky.
Chiang Mai, however, will still be a mid-size regional capital of wood-carving.
