A week with Luca – Welcome in Bangkok

I woke up to a winter day in Phuket. The sky was covered with menacing dark clouds and it was cold –merely 25 degrees Celsius. I drove the familiar route to school. It was surprising how after a week on vacation my auto-pilot still worked. Yet the feeling was so strange.

So much happened the last week. The adventure started in Bangkok, where I met my friend Lujan (Luca). Lujan and I became friends during our lost years after highschool. She moved to the States a year after I did but that was not the place in the world for her. A year later she moved to Spain, where she lived for ten years and then returned to Argentina a year and a half ago. She was the best person have around at this time of transition.

I took a taxi from Don Muang airport to The Chilli hotel. The driver left me on the main road and I ventured into the dark soi (alley) under the rain. It was passed midnight and Lujan was sleeping, tired from her trip in Cambodia. We hugged and then talked for hours, sitting on the bed, which was the only piece of furniture that fitted in the tiny room. It was the first night of sleep deprivation.

In the morning we took the boat on Chao Praya River to pier Chang. We walked by the Royal Palace and then visited Wat Po, the most famous temple in Bangkok. It was my third time in this temple, home of the biggest reclining Buddha in the world, and I was once more amazed by it. Nearby Wat Po we strolled amid hundreds of amulets, little Buddhist statues and antique objects along the several blocks of the Amulet Market. Then we stopped for lunch at a very typical Thai restaurant: concrete floors, tarp ceiling and no walls; a rickety table that we shared with Korean tourists and a couple of locals; the air saturated with burned oil smoke that makes you cough and sporadic gusts of durian stink.

Wat Po

The river had the strength of the rainy season and the boat rocked us back to the pier close to The Chilli hotel. We had time to refresh, pick up our luggage and walk to Hua Lampong train station. We arrived very early, so we sat at a coffee shop. At the station we found out that the train tracks to Chiang Mai were broken so we had to purchase a bus ticket at the last minute. It was very disappointing. The train was so much more enchanting! Plus, the bus was as cold and uncomfortable as a refrigerated truck for meat transportation. That was our second almost sleepless night.