So, I arrived safe and sound about 11 hours ago, and have seen something of Bangkok, too. What I have seen has been very nice indeed - the infamous congestion was not to be noticed, in fact the streets were a lot less jammed than anything in London proper and certainly a lot less hectic than Mumbai or Chennai. They have the count-down traffics lights here too! Pity I didn't get a photo.
I did get pictures of the tallest building in Thailand that seem to double as an advertisment for BMW but is actually the Hyatt building, not a hotel but the Asian offices for the company, I believe.
Anyway it's very very tall and slightly yellow, oddly constructed, and rather impressive. Seen it from the base and from the outskirts and everything.
Also a few other things worth mentioning, mostly architectural because the real notable features of where I went today - rambling through the poor backstreets and onto truly monumental building sites and semi-disused railway lines in the heart of the city - were places where I didn't fancy getting my camera out, just in case.
Generally though it seems I was needlessly paranoid, the Thai people here have been immensely friendly and helpful, polite, and very quick to laugh.
I was highly impressed with my taxi drivers, too, who presented themselves in an impressive variety of themes: quiet and reserved and sagacious and zen-like; loud and talkative and friendly and funny; patient and polite and keen to be helpful. All seemed to be totally genuine.
Two of them tried a little standardised overcharging (another guy who could have almost been mute and the loud and talkative one) and the first one gave back the difference when I admonished him about it, the second, highly talkative one I actually tipped even further, so charmed I was at the whole thing 
There is a lot of building work going on here, in some city blocks every building seem to be rising almost simultaneously, but at different rates, like a patch of mushrooms or new groundshoots.
I can't imagine how much traffic they must have to warrant a serious congestion problem because the whole of the city that I saw - and it is a big city and I was in clean, massive, commercial streets the whole time - was laced with flyovers and land bridges and aerial highways, with more being built all over at the same time.
The building site I stumbled into was actually about 40 sites that I could see, each constructing a megalithic support for an even greater aerial transport platform, and it could have taken about a dozen trains abreast by the look of it. The supports were each about 60 feet high and about 50 feet wide - vast rectangles of steel and concrete that were engineering marvels in their own right, yet I could see only 40 of them because the path of the whole gigantic endeavour curved away from me in both directions once I had trudged a half-kilometer up the track to the nearest road junction.
God knows how much that costs or how long it will take to complete.
I returned to the bus station in the afternoon after buying a couple of DVDs - which work so far - and realising that I could not explore any further as I would be charmed into missing my bus to Nong Khai in the North and let myself be sucked into the Bangkok charm all too easily.
I ended up swaying through and around the busy bus station for 5 hours in an attempt to not spend money, not carry my bags until I played the left luggage game again, and because I was slightly worried about missing my bus and losing the travel impetus as what I really wanted by this time was nothing more than some sleep.
Itt became hard to walk in a straight line and not just sit down every 5 seconds - and this bus station was Busy with a capital letter and everything, so it woudn't exactly have been a one of my best ideas 
The bus system for tickets and toilets (yes you gotta pay to pee in Bangkok it seems) was easy enough despite there being few English signs and most staff speak very little of the lazy travellers dialect
One lady at the information counter, presiently, was well versed, well clued-up, and well helpful, like. Got an overnight bus which gave me the day to explore, which is what I did.
The other main theme of my meanderings - besides stopping for coffee every hour to keep me upright and conscious - was the markets and bazaars - and they are quite unlike those of india in that only 2 people actively asked me to look at anything, and were endearingly polite and somewhat abashed when they did so. I couldn't perform a Gaijin Smash here if I wanted to, I feel.
But still - people are people and there's always a couple of pushy types, although here if you say `No` they seem to take that at face value and leave you alone.
We shall see how Laos and South East Asia view these things in general - for now at least, though, if I have the chance to come through Bangkok again and the transport links outward-bound seem to make that likely, I will have no objections at all
*After the fact* I still like the idea of Bangkok but it is even more crowded than the busiest bits of India in some places, notably that bus station. Getting the right bus wasn't hard even though there is no English translation in almost every place you could need it (tickets, destinations boards, signs of every kind) because they use `normal` Western cardinal numbers as well as the Thai set, which confusingly look a bit familair but are completely wrong.
In Laos, now, the banknotes are a bit of a nightmare because the Laotian number `2` looks almost identical to the number 6 in our way of writing. Bit of an arse for me, but quite possibly a tuk-tuk driver's dream 
But the bus was designed by, to use another phrase of Bryson's, `A midget seeking revenge on full-sized people' and I had to make the poor guy sat next to me pretty uncomfortable to match as I still couldn't sleep much and was encroaching on about 20% of his seat space with my bulky Caucasion frame and lumpy English ale-drinker's belly.
Plus I was wearing those boots which, while fine for climbing hard terrain and kicking in sturdy doors, are not ideal for long, cramped bus journeys where there is precious little space for size 10 feet clad in nought but socks, let alone size 11 steel-toe caps made sufficiently sturdy for the bloody Royal Marines to withstand desert warfare.
Nice to know they wont fall aprt on you, but something of a bit of overkill, I'm starting to think.
