20th January: Bangkok, Thailand
I woke up after 11 hours sleep feeling a little bit better today. We finally decided to try to find our way into the city centre (as if where we’re staying didn’t feel busy enough!). To get most of the way, we took a ferry along the Sansaeb Canal. This was ridiculously fast, loud, and choppy but quite fun. Like everything in Bangkok it had an engine three times as powerful and ten times as loud as it needed to be!
We weren’t really sure where we were going, so took a tuk-tuk tout up on the offer of a tour. This is not something I’d ever normally do and immediately regretted it. We were convinced we were about to get scammed as everything lined up with a well-known tuk-tuk scam, so paid the minimum agreed (100 baht, £2.40) and refused to get back in after the first stop. The anger of the driver (who’d gotten more than he would’ve for just the ride we’d taken) confirmed our suspicions. We did have a nice chat with a monk though, who may or may not have been in on it!
It was very hot and oppressive today, which we immediately noticed when walking away. Having hatched a new plan to head to a couple of the main Wats, we realised that it would take us over an hour to walk. Luckily, we were on a bus route. Somehow, 10 buses came in the other direction with no sign of ours. We were about to give up when ours finally showed up!
Needing lunch, we found a vegetarian food court on the top floor of a run-down old shopping centre. We immediately met three doctors – all in their 50s, two Thai and one Indian. Remarkably our introduction to them was the Indian man telling his colleagues and us that a cardboard cutout looked like his kidnapped son. After the day we’d already had, this set off immediately alarm bells, but they turned out to be lovely, genuine people. We ordered food from different stands, then he came back over insisting we tried an Indian snack he’d just bought. The two Thai doctors then pulled up extra chairs and insisted we joined them in an otherwise deserted seating area. They were excited about a lung transplant which had apparently happened today. We ended up sharing various snacks from the Thai stall we’d been to and the Indian one they had and had a lovely chat. They insisted that we had to make a trip to Ayutthaya tomorrow, which was one of our options anyway. Somehow, the conversation eventually ended up in a bizarre PowerPoint presentation on the good their new company was doing for kids needing treatment in rural Thailand. Such a weird day!
By now it was already half 3, so we chose one Wat to spend the rest of our day. This meant a ferry across the Chao (autocorrect must’ve been to Bangkok because it changed this to Chaos!) Phraya river to get to the incredible Wat Arun. This stupa is over 40 metres high and decorated with colourful stucco across the entirety of its otherwise white shape. It is also one of very few Wats that it is possibly to climb a little way up. It was spectacular in the afternoon light and the entire complex was beautifully peaceful, at least if you ignored people posing for photoshoots!
We tried to make it back across the river for sunset, but the ferry took an age to come and get across the busy waterway. The post-sunset sky was red again today because of the dusty air afflicting Thailand this week.
Walking back to the metro, we passed through a long street market. This was our escape from the busy roads and we did find some cheap mango sticky rice. There are very few green spaces in this city and it is horribly unwalkable, so this was as quiet as it got! The metro was busy in the evening rush, but everyone was politely waiting in neat lines to board and not trying to crush in if a train already appeared full. It’s definitely the friendliest and kindest behaviour we’ve seen on a transport network and sums up the nature of the Thai people we’ve been lucky enough to meet so far.
Unfortunately, the metro network is terribly unconnected and trying to get anywhere involves multiple out of station changes and separate ticket purchases for each line. Instead of taking another metro, we hopped on the speedy ferry back towards the area we’re staying in. This took on an extra dimension at night as the loudest engine I’ve ever heard propelled us along the canal with bow waves leaping over the 1.5 metre high walls on either side. Walking back, Kaja found some food and we took a mango smoothie. I’m still not feeling great and couldn’t manage anything else to eat after the lunch snacks.
Today, it felt like Bangkok happened to us. It is one of my least favourite places from this trip but counterintuitively a place I want to come back to. It has the energy of Istanbul and Hong Kong, although is even more impenetrable. 5 days was far too long and nowhere near long enough.