The Chaotic Charms of Chinatown

Piles of egg fried rice.  Check. Prawns in mouth-blasting chilli. Check. Fresh greens in enough garlic to put off Dracula.  Check. Crispy fish in hot and sour sauce, bubbling above a small flame.  Check. Oh and crispy shrimp cakes and bowls of steamed rice we ordered before we got food envy for the table next door and had to order the egg fried.  Dinner in Chinatown, with fuschia taxis, jade-green tuk-tuks and bright orange buses - neat lines of heads framed by the open windows - all rushing past, is not for the faint-hearted.

If Bangkok is hectic, Chinatown is...hmm, I'm actually kind of lost for words.  If this was a movie trailer it would be something like; in the land beyond frenetic, only the nimble-footed survive.  Or at least that's how it was during our first visit of the day, when we whizzed down on the MRT after breakfast, stopping off at another blingily-beautiful temple before heading into the madness.

What's interesting about Chinatown is how incredibly untouristy it is.  Walking up the main street, Yaowarat Road,  was a bit like an over-heated steeplechase; piles of rubble here, stalls selling New Year decorations there, lines of cream-faced ladies undergoing mang ming -  hair whisked from their faces with thin lines of cotton. Down dimly lit sois, or alleyways, grey-haired ladies bent their faces into steaming vats of soup and dim sum, scooters disappeared into the gloom, scarlet paper chains hung limply off grimy walls.  And instead of the usual gaggles of tourists you see in other Chinatowns around the world, it felt like we were the only farangs around.

Keen to get off the main drag we escaped east and found ourselves in Kampang market - a vast Chinese souk, where a thin stream of bodies wove between stalls and shops jampacked together, a mind-boggling array of shoes, bags, jewellery, kitchenware, stationery, anything, everything, and more of it than you could possibly ever need.  Every so often a side alley would cross the main artery and the human traffic would slow, while scooters and delivery carts growled at each other, negotiating for space.  I feared for my toes, constantly.  And of course somehow, squeezed inbetween the shops were more food stalls; battered pans and make-shift fryers serving up steaming broths and noodles, slurped down by the footsore and the bag-laden..

We'd been told that Yaowarat Road really came alive at night, so we headed back for dinner, to find the street ablaze with bulb-lit food carts and makeshift trestle tables set up for restaurants that really put the pop into pop-up.  We settled into Lek and Rut Seafood, where table-clearing consisted of scraping the remains of the previous diners' meal into a bucket beside our feet - and ate like kings.  Or queens.  Or like two slightly over-excited girls.  Which was exactly what we were.