Text: Bruce Dennill
Bruce Dennill is the editor of Very Interesting. Follow him on Twitter at @broosdennill.
Arriving in Bangkok, as in any large city, you’d expect layers – of history, culture and society; a hodge-podge of architectural styles sculpting the skyline. The Thai capital has all of those, but it also has actual tiers. Driving into the city from the Suvarnabhumi Airport and arriving in the popular Pathum Wan District, where you find many of the large shopping malls, including the tourist favourite MBK Center, you enter a brutalist spider web of elevated highways and Skytrain (what most of the locals seem to call the Bangkok Mass Transit System, a rail network another level up from the raised highway) towering above the ground-level tarmac. And below that, there is an underground train system (the Metropolitan Rapid Transit system), and a network of canals on which water buses kick up swelling wakes as they motor back and forth.
All of these channels are needed because Bangkok has a lot of people – the 2019 figures have the population at over 16 million – needing to get to a lot of places, many of them in cars or on motorcycles (another massive figure – around 9.7 million locals own a vehicle of some sort). If you’re on foot, then, it’s not a bad idea to stay off the road surface: taking on too many cars in multiple lanes can otherwise make you the hero in a computer-game style endeavour where you, unfortunately, don’t get extra lives. In fact, the received wisdom here is “Watch the cars; don’t expect them to watch you”.
Handily, then, there is the Skywalk, which links some of the bigger shopping centres – and the impressive Bangkok Art And Culture Centre, with its pleasingly dizzying spiral architecture as you look up from the foyer, as well as its buzzing coffee shops (plural; these people know how to fuel artists). [blur]The Skywalk is dotted with futuristic mushroom-shaped fixtures, presumably placed there to offer shade, but having the enjoyable additional effect of making you feel like you’re on the set of some sort of benign Blade Runner follow-up, with the mass-market flea-market wares of MBK on one side and the elite brands on display in the Siam Centre across the intersection. [/blur]
