The airport doors open and we push our way into the Bangkok air. It’s like falling face-first into a pool of tepid, murky water. Horns honk, touts shout.

“Where you go? Where you go?”

Lindsie and I get scammed on our first cab ride in Thailand from the airport to our hotel, the luxurious if farang-infested Asia Hotel in downtown Bangkok. (“Farang” means “long nose” in Thai, and it’s literal – my nose really is longer than those gracing the rather elegant faces of the locals.)

The ride scam is mild and far from insidious – a tout “helps” us find the taxis, then guides us into one where the driver doesn’t speak a word of English. He roars off to our hotel without turning the meter on or speaking a word, and we are charged three times the normal fare.

We know we’re being scammed, but don’t mind enough to protest. Wearing heavy packs and navigating a massive foreign airport, we’re happy to go with the flow on our first day, if this is how things work here.

Bangkok is astounding, massive, crazy. Filthy, primitive, sparkling and futuristic. Giant LCD screens over a row of stalls where vendors roast spit after spit of smoking chicken livers. We recoil from a menu after reading that the featured soup is “snake head.” We cling to each other in cabs and tuk-tuks, every moment feeling like we have just been snatched from the jaws of certain death.

A dollar buys us a bowl of noodle soup that tastes better than anything you will ever experience in North America. We begin to fall under the spell of Bangkok.

Thailand, we will learn, is changing fast in 2008. Even in Bangkok, for all its thousands of skyscrapers and seven million bustling Thais and about as many smoke-belching tuk-tuks, we had expected to see the legendary, radiant Thai smile everywhere. Sawadee, farangs! Welcome to amazing Thailand!

Things are a bit different now.

After a day, Lindsie and I have been approached by a few dozen, or maybe a few hundred, people offering to “help.” Where you go? Where you staying? Where you from? We chat with a security guard, telling him we’re from Canada. My English teacher, he is from Canada! We tell a tuk-tuk driver we are from Canada. My English teacher, he is from Canada! We look at each other, puzzled, learning.

After two days, we are feeling a bit deflated. Everyone who acts friendly is looking for money. If they learn they won’t get any, the smile evaporates and they turn away without another word, disgusted.

Sukumvit is Bangkok’s nana district – a nana couple being an old white farang and his young Thai girlfriend. I get off the Skytrain at Nana Station see plenty of these couples while walking to Soi 8, the name both of the street and of a cool English-style pub with mahogany bar and a cricket game playing on satellite TV. Lindsie has caught the cold I just recovered from, and is sleeping it off in our hotel. I am meeting my friend Dave, travel writer and stock photographer, who has living in Bangkok for some three years now. He confirms our suspicions about the new face of Bangkok.

“For a while, there was a balance with tourism here,” he tells me, “but now it’s gone the same way it has so many other places.

“Thais don’t smile anymore. They’re jaded, and it’s hard to blame them.”

So after a crash course in scam evasion, Bangkok style, Lindsie and I start get the hang of things. Our hotel doorman asks “Where you go?” and offers to summon a “friend” who can give us a ride. We tell him, “We go to a taxi. A metered one.”

Where you go? “Away.”

Where you go? “Where you go?”

We check out and flee to the outskirts of the city, where we find a hotel for a third the price (thanks Dave!) where the doormen only fetch real, metered taxis.

(The hotel has the unlikely name of Nasa Vegas, and with clean air-con rooms, hot shower, and American movies for $560 baht – about $18 – it’s a great value.)

After two days surrounded by flocks of shouting touts, we stroll the streets and alleys of what finally feels like the “real” Bangkok. We eat with the locals at streetside stalls, wander the markets, ride the canal boat to Lumpini Park and marvel at the 6-foot Komodo dragons as they tear into a hunk of carrion on the shore of a lake filled with swan-shaped paddle boats. We marvel sadly at shop fronts filled with sawed-off shark fins.

We shop the famous Mahboonkrong mall (MBK) and Lindsie gets a $200 pair of jeans tailored to fit for a total cost of 700 baht, about $20. We get the best hour-long foot massages of our lives for $10. Our wallets really are fat here. We watch children scurry across a pool in inflated hamster balls. We eat, sleep, haggle with vendors, agonize over the near impossibility of learning more than one Thai phrase per day.

“Does anyone here speak English?” Thii nii mii khrai bang thii phuut phaa-saa ang krit dai mai? Uh… no.

Ready for the beaches, we hop on a train to Trang province. Next stop: absolute paradise.

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