One Night In Bangkok
Bangkok, Thailand
January 3rd-4th, 2008
By Dan Murdoch

“Very Bond right?”
Tony, on tricking our way into Thailand

DIVERTING to Bangkok was a controversial decision.
It meant a longer route, but on better roads, and it would add another country to our hit list and let us pull the cars into the travellers Mecca of Khao San Road. But I had no particular desire to go and I was worried about driving into and out of that sprawling, congested city, and concerned that we could easily lose a few days.
But Lovey pretty much forced the decision by leaving his bags there when he went to collect the box of spare parts a few weeks ago.
We made the drive from Vang Vien in Laos to the Thai capital in one hit, stopping off in Vientiane to eat and collect a parcel of car sticker’s we’d been sent from the States.
The journey took about 26 hours. Carlos did most of the work on day one, driving from 10am till 3am, then I got to take over for the last six hours of highway and three hours of traffic. I hate that early morning shift, from dark through sunrise into the blazing noon, and I still felt ropey from New Years, so it really took it out of me.

The drive was pretty straight forward, except we weren’t sure how we would get on at Laos customs. We’d brought three cars into the country but, having dumped Dante on Christmas Day, we were only leaving with two. In many countries this would result in a fine of thousands of dollars, but we didn’t know how organised the Lao were.
We arrived at the border, the Friendship Bridge that links Lao with Thailand across the Mekong River, and began the process. But it soon became clear that the Americans had lost the car papers for Ziggy, and the guards weren’t going to let the car across without them. We stalled and stalled, but OJ couldn’t find them. Although we no longer had Dante, we did have Dante’s old papers and Dante’s old plates.
So, right at the border, in full view of guards, police, military and passers-by, the Ziggy crew began switching the plates.
“Very Bond right?” Tony asked.
I couldn’t help but laugh. Kind of Bond. It took 20 excruciating minutes. I'm sure in films it’s over in a flash.
Now the car plates matched the papers, although the model, year, and engine numbers didn’t, but luckily the guards didn’t check.
We made it across and entered Thailand, our 20th country.
But the long drive took its toll on Fez, which broke down three times in the Bangkok traffic: brakes seized, spark plug popped, cylinder head smashed up.

Petrol stations can tell you a lot about a country. They weren’t bad in Laos, were they mostly had pumps, unlike Uzbekistan where we bought our gasoline in old coke bottles. Thai petrol stations are a wonder of cellophane-wrapped indestructible snacks that are so pumped with e-numbers and preservatives that only they and cockroaches survive the WW3. Hot dogs, microwave burgers, instant noodles, frozen meals and dried out pastries compete with the chocolate, crisps, coffee, tea and every soft drink under the sun thankfully kept chilled to a Siberian cool.
If these things had been available along our whole journey the trip would have been considerably more comfortable.

The big camera that we’ve been using to film this whole debacle broke at some point in Vang Vien, so we found a Sony repair shop in Bangkok. It would take about a week to fix, so we decided to leave it behind and OJ would collect it when he flew out of Bangkok later in the year. We still had the mini cam so, although it was a disappointment, it wasn’t show-threatening, we could still film the end of the Trek.

As expected, Bangkok traffic really is shocking- worse than Beijing, worse even than Budapest. The only way to avoid it is to pay a hefty fee to join the elite on the toll roads that exist high above the mayhem- a rollercoaster circuit of swerving overpasses built over the maelstrom.
Unfortunately Carlos and I managed to get thoroughly lost on this racing circuit (Carlos: “I know the way.” He didn’t.), paying repeated tolls, losing the Americans and having to return to the underworld to get to our destination anyway.
We parked the car at one end of Khao San to wait for Ziggy. We got quite a lot of attention, handing out fliers and telling our story, and everyone was pretty impressed with what we’d done.
It felt good to sit there with our battle-scarred cars after all we’ve taken them through- though the police didn’t seem to think so, but we’re good with police now. In fact it was a joy to be pulled over for the first time in months. I’ve lost my driving license, but we managed to wing it.
We had the usual offers from tuk tuk drivers: “You want see ping pong girls? You want see show?”
Carlos was asked: “You want girl? Very beautiful, just 15 years.”
So the guy basically had Carlos pegged as a paedo straight away. Something about the glasses maybe?
Khao San may have gone a little upmarket since I was last there, almost seven years ago.
The bars look a little trendier, a little better decked out. There’s more premiership football, more internet at the pubs and a bit of wifi floating about. It’s not so filthy and there are more ATMs as well as a McDonalds and a Burger King. Still selling pad thai and fried grasshoppers though and there are still pirate CDs, but now pirate computer games too and even Mac programmes.

There was some discussion over what the Spaniard would do next. His mum arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to meet him on January 1st. It was now the third and we were still a few days drive away.
So Carlos was planning to fly out from Bangkok to the Cambodian capital ASAP, then we’d catch up by Trabbi in a few days. But when we crossed into Thailand we had registered Carlos as the driver on Fez’s car documents. So we weren’t sure if he would be allowed to fly out without the car, or if we could get the car out of the country without him.
In the end we decided it wasn’t worth the risk and he would drive with us to Cambodia, if we had serious delays across the border he could always get a bus to meet his mum.

I almost wasn’t allowed into Thailand at all. My passport expires in three months and it is Thai policy that your passport must be valid for six months. The border guard eventually stamped it, but gave me a telling off and warned that I wouldn’t be allowed into Thailand like this again, adding that Cambodia wouldn’t let me in either.
I got in touch with the UK embassy, who said it was impossible to extend my passport, I would have to apply for a new one, which would take a week.
No one was willing to wait in Bangkok that long, so I had a couple of options. I could try to get a new passport, then fly out to meet the others. But that would put me behind by a week and mean I would probably miss the end of the trip.
I could go to the Cambodian embassy first thing and beg for permission to enter the country. But what if they refused and made a note of my passport number, guaranteeing I wouldn’t make it into Cambodia?
There was a chance the border guards wouldn’t notice and I’d sail in. Then I could apply for a new passport in Phnom Penh at the end of the trip.
But there was also a chance I could be refused entry into Cambodia. By that point I would already have been stamped out of Thailand and unable to return. So I’d be caught in no-mans-land with a valid but expiring passport and no country that would take me in.
This wouldn’t be ideal.
In the end I decided to go for it, we’d blagged plenty of borders up till now- just one crossing left.
We planned to leave at 5am to give Carlos the best chance of meeting his mum. I was still feeling pretty terrible so I got an early night, as did Carlos, but the Americans stayed out drinking till the early hours and didn’t enjoy getting woken up at 4.30am.
“I'm still drunk. There’s no way I can drive,” Tony told me when he made it down. I felt rubbish too, whatever I had was more than a New Year’s hangover, it cant last four days, so I just lay down in Fez hoping I wouldn’t wake up again until the border.
But we’d only been driving for twenty minutes when Ziggy pulled over. The Yanks shouted out the window at us: “Have you seen the mini cam?”
Shit.
We raced back to the hotel, but it had gone and no one there knew anything about it. Tony thinks he may have left it on the floor of the hotel when we drove off.

So now we were in a race against time to find a video camera and cross the border. We phoned the Sony centre, but the one we dropped off wasn’t repaired yet. We looked at buying a minicam, but it was expensive. So Lovey phoned a contact at the Foreign Correspondents Club and they put us in touch with a company that loans professional quality cameras. For $500 a week we could borrow one identical to the awesome Sony that was being repaired.
It seemed the only option so we went to grab it, but by the time we’d waded through the thick Bangkok traffic, collected the camera and got out of the city, there was no way we were going to make the border before it closed. Sorry Carlos’s mum.
We drove to Aranyapratet, six kilometres from the border, found a hotel and slept.
It felt strange being so close to our goal. If all went well, the Trek could be over in just a few days.
But first I had to make it across the Cambodian border with an invalid passport.

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