Barmy in Bangkok

Bangkok is filled with interesting personalities, like this tuk-tuk mobile marketing man. Photo / Michele Hewitson

My cousin's boy was detoxing so he was having green chicken curry and beer for breakfast. Spend any time at all in Bangkok and this sort of carry on will seem almost sane. We were sitting on the street in Th Khao San, that quarter once infamous for drugged-out hippies, now full of cheap tat and neo-hippies on other trips. My cousin's boy was on his way to a beach where what passes for a holiday is daily colonic irrigation.

The cousins were staying at Nanas where, for $20 a night, they got a shared room, a shower on an outdoor balcony, and a sign on the stairs which read: "If you bring ladies, we may charge you extra." They weren't charged for taking me to their room; perhaps it depends on the lady.

We left the boy to his navel-gazing and followed the promise of a breeze to the river, through the alleyways of Banglamphu, to the pier, where we got on a boat. We stopped at a floating petrol station for diesel, and beer for retoxing purposes.

We drifted past a floating funeral parlour, the coffins stacked up outside; lounging monks; shacks and mini-mansions; an old woman soaping her breasts; little boys diving, their round bare bums sticking up like a row of ducklings. A woman in a sarong, her newly washed hair in a towel turban blew us a kiss.

My cousin said: "I don't know if I'd be so obliging if I had strangers peering into my living room every day."

Infinity had only been open a day. We chanced upon it on the way back from the pier: a tiny bar, a strangely successful mix of 50s kitsch and Buddhist shrine and a couch on the footpath. The barman fell in love with my cousin. So did the barlady, who may have been a bar man in another life. The barman delivered the drinks with a little dance. The barlady with a flutter of false eyelashes. We sat for two hours that felt like a very happy infinity, drinking the cheap and good local rum, Sang Sum, with fresh pineapple juice.

After dark we wandered back through the district, past the street vendors, the scent of the banana pancake stands, to the tune of the bicycle horn tooted by the crazy advertising man in his white suit. You have to make a splash to get noticed in Bangkok, city of crazies.

Catch the Sky train to see the young, ultra-cool, ultra kooky Bangkok kids in their best: a girl got up to look like Holly Hobbie, with a patchwork pinafore, matching hand bag and plaits.

The Sky train is cheap, easy to use and allows a reprieve from the taking your-life-in-your-hands experience that is getting around in Bangkok traffic. I'd catch it late at night, alone, and always felt safe. Except for the time I came down the stairs into the dark street and was jumped by a figure with a gun: a 4-year-old boy with a water pistol. I said: "You're very naughty."