Fishing In The Post Apocalypse Mall..

The Mall On The Other Side Of The Apocalypse..

On one late Autumn night in March 2014, I was huddled up on a couch in Australia and killing time on my computer when I happen to stumble across a comment on a Facebook thread that would immediately crawl in under my skin and make itself at home. Someone had heard a rumor about an abandoned shopping mall somewhere in Asia that had flooded and subsequently become home to a large population of Koi and this person was looking to find clues to it's existence and possible whereabouts. I eagerly followed the thread hoping to learn more but found that as the comments slowly dried up I was left hanging with no concrete information, no photographic evidence, no first hand accounts.. nothing but an explosion in my mind at the thought of the possibilities and burning desire to find out if this place really existed. Cue the inevitable sleepless night that followed filled with the pounding of various word combinations into Google until finally I happened across a grainy, pixelated, low-res yet outstandingly exciting image and the name that accompanied it; New World Mall, Bangkok, Thailand.

As I poured through various websites and my eyes grew wider with excitement at the various images a thought suddenly hit me like a steam train and for a moment I held my breathe as the sound of my heart beating in my chest began resounding in my ears. As many of you know, after many years living in India we're relocating the beautiful mountains of Northern Thailand and so between mid-October and mid-November we doing some traveling, a lot of traveling, including journeying from Australia to Thailand, Thailand to India, India to Thailand (and then in December Thailand to Laos to Thailand.. don't ask!) and that during this time we will be passing through Bangkok on at least two different occasions. I furiously opened up my travel itinerary and there it was, a 17 hour stopover in Bangkok between connecting flights on our way to India! If I could track this place down and organise our timing just right, I might actually be able to step foot inside it for myself!! The thought immediately caused my heart rate to double.

New World Mall, Bangkok..

 
Seven months later and the thick, heavy, humid air was filling my lungs as I hurriedly pushed my way through the masses along the sidewalks of Bangkok. After much research I had managed to track down an old address online and so booked our accommodation close by, and with the help of Google Maps in my pocket I was feeling confident that I was where I was meant to be and that I was on my way to something special. Suffice to say that after 25 minutes of walking with a growing feeling of confusion a helpful police officer was able to enlighten me that I'd been walking in the complete wrong direction since my first step out of the guest house.. niiiiiiice.

Fast forward through the long walk back and I soon found myself on the street which I knew the Mall was just off. I walked the length of it three times but any indication of a giant abandoned mall filled with fish was nowhere to be seen. Most things I'd read online about the mall were now a couple of years old and one mentioned how it was highly likely to demolished and developed at any time as it was in a area of growth and gentrification; a growing sense of foreboding and impending letdown was upon me. 

... B&W Three Shot Panoramic ...

From what I could gather online, it seems that some years back a brand-spanking-new eleven story Mall was being built in downtown Bangkok which would go by the name of the New World Mall. The unforeseen Global Financial Crisis in 2007-8 meant that the funds to finish the project dried up and soon after the doors closed on a half finished Mall. But the story doesn't end there, oh no, the eleven story mall was being built in an area where the zoning regulations prohibit construction above the seventh floor and so when the council came in and knocked it back down to it's seventh floor they opted to not bother with putting a roof on. This one act of a leaving a completely exposed and roofless mall meant that when the monsoon rains arrived they fell into a perfect reservoir and over time came to completely fill the bottom floors. With Malaria and other Mosquito borne diseases being a problem throughout Thailand, the story goes that a local man released a handful of fish into the waters to eat the Mosquito larvae and as this was an artificial watercourse which therefore had no natural predators in it, the fish thrived and began to multiply.

But this is where I come back into the story. You see I was standing on the corner of a small and completely nondescript alleyway that was filled with plastic tables and chairs and one or two of street food vendours, the same alleyway I had already walked across the mouth of 3 times, when I I saw the Krungthai Bank logo, the landmark I was searching for, and realised I was precicely where I was suppose to be.

 
I began walking down the alley and could see that less than 20 meters a head of me the alley ran into a wall and became a dead end. Two-thirds of the way down on the right however I could see a large wire fence covered in green shade cloth running parallel to the wall, the type of fence you put up around the outside of construction sites when you want to keep people out, and smack bang in the middle of this was a gate with a handwritten Thai sign which even as a foreigner I could tell said 'Do Not Enter!' My heart began pounding harder and harder as I stepped closer but I wasn't able to even get within a couple of meters of the gate before an elderly Thai man grabbed my arm and regaled me with the universal hand gestures for 'You can't go in there.'

I asked as politely as I could (currently being a non-Thai speaker this wasn't quite so easy) if I could just pop my head in quickly but he kept waving me away. I know the Thai word for 'Fish' and so I pointed to the gate and said "Plā" and the old man and his friend nodded vigorously yet with even more vigor they waved me away. He picked up a rather large piece of concrete from the floor and gestured that it had fallen from the roof, he then repeatedly tapped the top of his head - now after three years in India I've gotten pretty flippin good at charades (you should see me trying to ask my neighbors if they've seen my wife's bra after it's blown off the clothes line on our roof) and so I knew he was telling me that it wasn't safe for me to go in because  the roof/walls/giant pieces of concrete were liable to fall on my head. I appreciated his concern but yet found myself standing at the crossroads in which one direction meant to walk away and miss out on potentially seeing something amazing whilst the other was to stay and try and change the minds of these immovable objects/gentlemen without having any grasp on the language at all. I opted for the latter.

I began by using the few Thai phrases I knew; "Hello, my name is...," "I am .... years old," "I come from ...." etc. etc. etc. But it had little effect. I dug deeper into my memory bank and came back with "I like Thai Food," then I smiled real big. Both gentleman smiled politely and waved me away. I had pretty much exhausted my repertoire of Thai sentences and so was force to reverted to single words. "Fish. Buffalo. Monk. Temple. Bottle Water. Airport. Left. Man. Traditional Hats." That slightly sideways quizzical look began taking over the old mans face so I continued; "Child. Right. Little. Novice Monk. Elephant. Symbols. Snake... Pad Thai!!" The corner of the old man's mouth began to tremor and slowly raised into a smile. Success!!
  

First Floor; Women's Hosiery..

He began chuckling and so I kept on repeating my random assortment of Thai words and he turned slowly and led me up and through the gate. From the street side of the gate the opaque green cloth obscured all vision of what was on the other side but within one step through the gate the attached photos were all I could see. It was astounding. There was no long walk, no scrambling through tunnels, just one step through a wire gate and I was standing in the place that had been dominating my mind for months on end. What's more, literally millions upon millions of people would pass within a handful of meters of this place each year and yet the vast majority would never know it existed. To be so fortunate was rather humbling.
 
I'm not sure of what breed of fish they were (fairly sure they weren't Koi - at least not a breed that I'm aware of) but goodness me they were huge and numerous! Hundreds and thousands of amazing dark Blackish-Blues and Albinos splashing around in this cavernous underground wonderland. And when the old man began hitting a metal pipe that protruded from the water with a stone the fish turned and almost uniformly began swimming towards us whereby he reached into a bag and threw a mass of pellets to them which they swarmed over and devoured in an instant. I whipped out my camera and began shooting in what was a massively tricky lighting situation, and though deep down I'd love to go back and improve on these images, I'm happy enough to have come away with a handful of keepers. The old man began pointing at the roof above me and I could see where large slabs of concrete had become dislodged and fallen all over the floor, within 2 or 3 minutes since first entering he again he grabbed my arm and this time I knew it was the right time for me to leave.

All in all it was one of the more exciting and surreal moments of my life. When I burst back into the guesthouse and couldn't stop my lips from pouring forth the longer (and exceptionally more boring) account to Wild Flower (but she's a great woman and an even better wife so has learned how to put up with my ramblings) and I was riding the high for days. So if you ever find yourself in Bangkok and want to hunt down one of the most amazing places on earth make sure to get yourself to Banglumphu Junction on Samsen Road (walking distance from the main backpacker district of Khao San & Ram Buttri Road), find the Krungthai Bank (big blue sign with a white eaglish-hawkish-birdish logo) then keep your eyes pealed for the small and easily missable Soi Kraisi, turn right into it and look for the green netting a stones throw away on your right. The only other advice; just make sure to have your list of completely random and completely unrelated Thai words at the ready.


* Dedicated to my ole boy Ragnar - It's not Kolmanskop, but it's getting close!

Beauty & Chaos..

This is Chet Singh Palace, a gorgeous old Fort that sits on the Gunga (Ganges River) not too far from our place. I took this photo at sunrise back in April this year and I simply love the way that the ubiquitous grime and sludge can momentarily disappear and the whole city begins to shine each day at first light. That the grime is gone is an illusion to be sure, but it's worth giving into the illusion, even just for a little bit, and simply bask in the stunning show of ancient beauty this place puts on each day.

I also love the way that even amongst the crazy flooding that's currently going on in our city the locals can take the time to make the most of the rising waters by combining elements that we can all enjoy; stunning ancient architecture - and jumping off tall things.

(All the following photos are taken of the tower on the left in the above image)

When my Winnie Wild Flower came home earlier she said "As I was walking up the path to our house I swear I saw a boy flying through the air over near the Gunga!" Turned out she wasn't half wrong.

 

It's worth noting the white writing on the wall down near the water as it identifies the high water mark from the biggest floods Varanasi had back in 1962. It's only a few more feet before it reaches that spot and the waters are still rising daily so it will be a very interesting next few days to see what happens and whether more parts of the city will go underwater. Prayers for the people of Banaras would certainly be worthwhile.

The Rains Came Down & The Floods Came Up..

This is a photo I took a few months back when we took some friends on a sunrise boat ride on the Gunga ('River Ganges'). This is at a place called Assi and it's a great part of town to hang out. It's got some good places to eat, some semi-decent guesthouses and along the Ghats* there's plenty of 5 rupee chai wallas* (roughly AU$0.092) where you can sit, have a drink and just take it all in. 

Take a look at that line of orange flags in the background of this image that are on the right hand side. The ones above the guy on the right holding his washing. The ones way up high, far away from the river side.

 

Because they're the same one in this photo. The ones on the right hand side, blowin about in the morning breeze. And yep, that's the Gunga way down there behind them too.

Because those are the same one on the right hand side of this picture that I took 2 mornings ago. Torrential rain in the northern Indian states is traveling downstream and causing the worst flooding Banaras has seen in the last 10 years.

You can see the sign for the Pizzeria in the above image, I managed to get across and get just inside the top level of it to see the damage. Below is an old photo of the top level where orders are made and the food is prepared in the wood fire or tandoori oven (the seating is on both of the now completely submerged lower floors).

  

And this is a current photo of the top level.

Likewise, these are some before and after shots I took from the the roof of our friends pad.

I feel so strange about these floods.

Part of me finds the whole thing terribly exciting.. and I guess it makes sense. I've never seen flooding in a city like this before and seeing areas I'm so used to walking, sitting and hanging out in being covered by 50 feet of water is wild, it gives these areas I know so well a completely different feel and actually makes some of them more clean and green and peaceful. 

But the other side of me can't get past the reality that these floods are wiping away peoples lives. I don't mean people drowning in the rising waters (though that's certainly a possibility), but that hundreds of businesses are completely flooded out, a friend told me that some of the larger houses and building complexes near his house that were constructed on the sandy banks of the Gunga have partly collapsed into the waters, and countless homes, particularly of the poorest of the poor have been waterlogged and gutted. Our sweet helper Rina told us that the water in her house came up to her waist and that a large amount of their possessions have been ruined. I imagine that this is currently the same story for literally thousands of poor families who have settled their lives on the banks of the Gunga. If you're the praying kind,I'd encourage you to take a few moments and pray for the people of Banaras as many of them are going to be doing it particularly tough for the time to come.

* 'Ghats' = The stone steps that descend into the water that run the entire length of the city
* 'Walla' = Literally translates as 'the one,' used here to mean "The Chai guy"