Learning to love Bangkok’s twisted blight (Photos)

By Todd Ruiz

Apr 17, 2019 | 1:32pm Bangkok time

You can take away our zoos, our landmark hotels and our night markets, but you can’t take away our aerial eyesores – though not for want of trying.

Over four years after we wrote that Bangkok’s coiled cable chaos was going the way of the phone booth – and wrote again and again – the city has again announced it is happening for real this time.

City Hall says it will soon begin work to underground all data lines under the capital city’s 1,000-kilometer-plus roads.

We’re not holding our breath. After all, these same people have been unable to install enough usable elevators at every BTS station in over four years.

Occasional efforts have been made – and heavily publicized – to purge the city of its black nests of nightmare; most vigorously after being called out by an ill-informed Bill Gates in 2016. Declarations of war against overhead wiring echo through the headlines in the same rhythm as vows to eliminate paralyzing traffic, teen pregnancy and pigeons.

Let’s be real. Bangkok is, day by day, rapidly sinking in part due to the sheer volume of soapy massage, so running multi-thread fiber optic lines under its skin may be implausible.

Instead of fighting the inevitable, let’s celebrate our gnarly knots of Category 6 twisted pair and six-strand RJ11 looping majestically through the air. Let the tourism authority promote their amazing-ness and get UNESCO to recognize their “tangible heritage.”

Here are some fine examples to include with that application: