Chinatown!

It took me four hours to make my way across town, people kept shaking their heads. “Too far for walking.” “There won’t be much happening,” said the girl who’d been to Brisbane and Sydney, “the night markets are closed Mondays.” Late night shops spilled onto pavement and street, selling nothing I recognised. Explosive seething crowds sat stuffing themselves. I had a plate of something peculiar and slippery with pork and a durian ice cream pungent with sweet rot which I can still taste hours later. At Hua Lamphong, the huge hooped central station, people lay splayed on sheets of cardboard motionless and most of them asleep. But when a ute backed in stacked with bottles of water, a hundred people jumped up and ran; they were queuing back to the end of the taxi rank before I could work out what it was. At first I thought they were all hoping to be given a lift, in the tray of his tiny vehicle.