This is part two of my highly underrated Patong traffic series. Part one is here.

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Bangla Road in Patong is where the freaks come out at night. It’s like a miniature walking street, or an adult-oriented Khaosan Road, depending on how you look at it. Here you will find tourists looking to drink until they drop; stag and hen nights out to humiliate a bride or groom; and young boys and girls on tour trying to see a bit of the world.

There are bar girls and ladyboys; gays and oddballs; guys in wheelchairs and girls on crutches; a man with one leg selling cheap cigarettes and a 12-year-old girl selling lighters and flashing lights.

Confused travellers have their pictures taken with enormous lizards and strange-looking monkeys while the police crack down on people riding motorbikes through the soi. A magician dressed as a cowboy entertains the masses as a katoey bursting out of her top preys on solitary males.

Is this real life? It can’t be, surely. Sat from the safety of a bar selling Thailand’s finest beers for 50 baht, this was all I saw.

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I used to struggle to stay awake during the day when I was working in Bangkok. This made office hours a chore and I often found myself taking mini naps of between five and 10 seconds to get through the day. Every now and then I’d take a mini nap and do that thing where your body sort of jumps back out of sleep for comedic effect. I tried to pass off such convulsions as part of a vigorous stretching routine; I’m not sure if anyone was fooled.

I was sick one day and went to get some aspirin. As you can imagine in Thailand, the whole HR department freaked out and supplied me with all manner of colored pills – all this for a headache and a runny nose! Thailand wastes a lot of money on unneeded medicine, but I got a little something extra from the cocktail of medicines I was given – I got the Actifed effect.

I spent the rest of the day high as a kite and stole the pack for future experimentation. Actifed is available over the counter in Thailand and it’s commonly used by people who have colds. One of the side effects of Actifed is that it perks you up like you’ve drunk half-a-dozen cups of coffee.

Feeling a bit dozy this afternoon, I necked my remaining two pills and got on with work in a kind of hazy bubble. I wouldn’t recommend anybody take Actifed every time they feel tired, but now and then it seems to be more effective than Red Bull. As for coffee, well, I can’t drink it without shaking afterwards and feeling like my head is about to explode.

Actifed in Thailand is made of 2.5mg Triprolidine and 60mg pseudoephedrine. It was the pseudoephedrine that had bells ringing in my head. Ephedrine is commonly used by students and office workers to stay alert and awake. It’s also occasionally passed off as ecstasy in clubs. The effect is similar to a strong cup of coffee.

Pseudoephedrine can have similar effects, as I will testify to. Outside of Thailand, Pfizer, the company that makes Actifed, changed the formula to contain 4mg chlorpheniramine maleate instead of pseudoephedrine. This change hasn’t hit all of Thailand’s pharmacies yet.

Have you come across any other weird and wonderful over-the-counter medicines in Thailand?

Techno’ tags: Thailand, Bangkok, Actifed

Sitting at gate 8 in the departure lounge at Don Mueang airport, each lonely contingent around me was enveloped in personal meditations. Each group was sat equidistant from the next; there was a strong feeling of helplessness throughout. People spoke quietly or else not at all.

I was due to fly to Phuket and had no feelings – neither good nor bad – towards my fellow passengers. A group of three girls disturbed the silence in typically drunk, English style. They looked like students, probably on a gap year with a list of destinations to tick off on an itinerary. They laughed boisterously and chattered constantly, exhibiting mindless traits. I immediately took a dislike to them as they made their way down the escalator and found themselves somewhere to sit. They might have been public school girls, I thought. “Be quiet you, you’ll wake everyone up,” one of them burst out with.

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I’d always thought that the rainy season in Thailand was supposed to run from June to October, but it appears to have come early this year. I wasn’t quite prepared for the barrage of thunderstorms and downpours that we’ve had in Bangkok these past few days. It even felt a bit cold today. What does all this rain in Bangkok mean? Is it a sign that the world is spinning backwards and that God is perhaps experimenting with new techniques for his seasons? Is it going to start snowing soon? I’m getting drenched every day here, whatever the cause.

Typically between March and May is what they call summer in Bangkok. The temperatures soar, the sun burns us pale-skinned folk, and most people walk around with bags shading their heads. But here we are at the end of April and the rain is coming down in bucketloads.

It’s raining in the south also, but that’s to be expected given that the rainy season there runs from around May to November. November to February is generally Bangkok’s mild season, with at least one or two days when you might actually feel cold. The locals, however, spend most of the mild four-month period shimmying around down in coats and hats.

I was once told that it takes something like between two and three years to get used to a tropical climate. It’s amazing how fast the weather in Thailand can turn. One minute it’s baking, the next minute you have to catch a boat home. Have I really blogged about Thailand’s weather today? It’s better than blogging about a sandwich, that’s for sure.

Techno’ tags: Thailand, Bangkok, Weather