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!

I've Got Worms..

For many, admitting to the world that they have worms is a nightmare on par with loosing your pants on stage at your school assembly. But for me, it's reason so celebrate!

As you can see above, the path outside my house morphs into a decent flowing stream during the monsoon rains and manages to channel the bulk of the downpour that lands on the property past my front door, out the main gates, down our neighbour's gulley, and out into the main street. One of the sad things I've come to notice is that once the soil becomes waterlogged, the earthworms are forced to the surface (which depending on who you read means that they're either in search of oxygen or alternatively are using the opportunity afforded them of a slippery wet ground to travel greater distances overland), and then decide to travel with the current of water in which ever direction it may take them.

If you're familiar with some of my earlier posts, you'll know that in amongst the countless hours I've spent sifting through the soil in the Resurrection Garden I'd never once come across even a single Earthworm and so to finally see worms (and worms in abundance) on the property was a tremendously exciting event! (Yes, I recognise how that sounds! But don't pretend all you gardeners don't know what I'm talking about!) So I'm sure you can all feel my pain when I came to discover the worms actively moving with the current down the path, past my front door, out the main gates, down our neighbour's gulley, and to their deaths out in the street.

Seeing this tragedy unfold forced my heart and hands into action and out into the rains I went to save these little guys from the cruel streets Banaras and whisk them away to the safety and comfort of a cut up old coke bottle. My neighbour's sons (you may remember them from When a violent riot explodes outside your house) were intrigued by my growing collection of worms so I enlisted their help by offering them 10rupees per small container of worms that they collected. Their eyes went wide with excitement at the prospect of making 10 rupees (roughly AU$0.17) per container, however they are Brahmin kids (the top Hindu Caste) and when their Father caught them picking up worms he swiftly put an end to it.

I remained undeterred in my rescue efforts and before long Little Feather came out to see what I was up to and soon joined in the fun. It was interesting watching my neighbour's sons being extremely timid in their approach to picking up worms; only using sticks and other implements to lift them and squealing if they squirmed onto their hands or feet, contrasted with Little Feather who just charges in and grabs hand fulls of them and now affectionately refers to them as "Mr Wormy-Worms" who are "our Friends." I've got to say, I'm pretty fond of this kid of mine!

In just over an hour we collected goodness knows how many hundred worms (and some pretty decent sized ones too) who were destined for relocation to their new home in the Resurrection Garden. The same surfacing of worms happened again and again throughout Monsoon (essentially anytime it rained heavily) and so I was able to curtail the mass exodus of worms from the property whilst substantially growing the population of worms in my veggie plots. 

I'd like to say that it was all a roaring success but in the spirit of full disclosure, I did, on one occasion, leave a collection of worms in a 10L bucket that had some soil and leaves in it in my spare room for a couple of days. When I finally had the time to move them to the garden, I went in to the spare room and was shocked to find not one single worm still alive. In fact, I didn't find even one single worm. So either there is a collection of Worms currently hiding under the bed (I did actually look there) or the entire group of worms completely disintegrated into a liquid in the space of 50hours. Remarkable creatures! That experience was certainly enough to teach me not to keep them longer than I had too.

Now, to leave you on a slightly more informed note so you won't feel like you've totally wasted your time, here are some facts about Mr Wormy-Worms that may or may not just blow your mind;
* Earth worms do not have eyes (but they can still see, kinda)
* Earth worms do not have hearts (but they still have blood pumping throughout their bodies)
* Earth worms do not have brains (thus will survive the Zombie apocalypse)
* Earth worms are hermaphrodites (possessing both the male and female reproductive organs)
* Earth worms can, on average, live for 6.5 years (older than both my kids combined)
 

Monsoon Musings..

 

It's coming to the end of Monsoon here in Banaras and you can notice the change in the air. It's only my second monsoon here in India and so maybe I'm mistaken, but it feels like it's been fairly light on with the rains this time round. We had plenty of flooding in the city but the overwhelming majority of that was coming from upstream and so whilst there were times when you could literally sit and watch the flood water rising before your very eyes, we hadn't seen more than a few drops of rain in over a week.

On those days where the rains did set in you really hoped and prayed that you didn't have to brave the flooding roads and go anywhere till tomorrow but instead could just sit and enjoy cool shift from inside your house. Unless you're one of our kids, in which case you couldn't wait to get outside and get as wet and as muddy as possible.

 

And of course, once the rains were done you had those joyous playgrounds known as Puddles.

Yes, that is a Papad/Papadum in Little Feather's hand.. what else could you possibly want to chew on while splashing about in puddles in India.

I love letting her loose in the puddles to enjoy what I'm thinking should be a universally required part of childhood.

And I must admit I also enjoy the look on my neighbour's faces! Cleanliness is a highly prized virtue around these parts and so the idea of letting your child play in the muddy puddles is probably something akin to child abuse, or more likely something that would bring great embarrassment upon yourself and your family. And being an Australian (coupled with an inability to curb the driftings towards those more quietly subversive parts of my nature), I'm often more than happy than not to get out there and get wet with the little ones.

When my sweet neighbours - often with eyes wide as dinner plates - inform me that my daughter is getting wet (usually around 15-20 minutes since we've started playing in the rain and are both thoroughly resembling drowned rats) I've learned to simply reply in Hindi "No No, it's Ok! She's Australian!" I feel like this has the dual outcome of both educating my neighours that not everyone in the world feels this way about kids playing in puddles, but also that is confuses them long enough for Little Feather to make her escape to the other end of the path to keep on kicking them puddles! Viva la Puddle Revolución!!