Finding the exit to the tourist bubble: closer than I thought.

Sick of the tourist bubble in Bangkok but unable to see the door--my only guide is Lonely Planet which IS the tourist bubble; if you talk to anyone they only know about the inside of the tourist bubble; they don't even know a Thailand outside that bubble exists. Yet I'd seen the outside in Phetchaburi, a town effectively without any foreigners in it, and thus no tourist industry. Now here I was stuck in it again. However, before I'd even left Bangkok for Chiang Mai, there, in the public bus station, I found the exit: I was outside the foreigner-bubble. It had all the elements of fascination, awkwardness, hyper-self-consciousness, linguistic difficulty, and emotional discomfort that comes with having stepped outside the tourist bubble, alone. There was a gigantic hall with large areas of rows of chairs for waiting, and crowds of people milling around: and not one foreigner in sight. It was exhilarating. Clearly, foreigners don't take public buses (which are much cheaper and less prone to robbery), but pay through the nose for travel agents to arrange special tourist buses, get their bags stolen often and are ripped off. Clearly, most tourists don't even /read/ their Lonely Planet guides (myself included, mostly) as all the public bus info is in there, and warnings against ripoff tourist buses. It was exciting to have been able to dip my toe outside the tourist bubble with so little effort, and sit there on the edge of my discomfort, being stared at and staring. And scribbling constantly in my journal or rummaging incessantly through my backpack, as befits my role as a backpacker.

The tourist bubble, it seems, is more than merely a matter of beaten paths along popular and well-infrastructured routes. In Bangkok's Khao San area, which is the total epicentre of Thailand's massive tourist industry (it's biggest industry by far), you can, if you know where, walk a mere 10 metres down an alley, and be back in 'real' Thailand. There are umpteen whole restaurants where you /never/ see a foreigner, right there in the centre of Khao San. It's astounding how foreigners simply don't, for the most part, explore. Above all, they don't walk. Should you venture a block or two from Khao San road, you don't need to know about the alleys to escape the farangs (foreigners), there just /aren't any/. It baffles me, the strange way in which the tourist bubble works. Even if I depend on Lonely Planet, I've discovered, I can still see a Thailand relatively untainted by the tentacles of the tourist industry, and relatively free of the crouds of beerswilling Brits, Aussies and Israelis.