We had two nights in Bangkok which began as high farce and largely continued in the same vein, ending with us promising ourselves that we will have to return one day and give the city another try.
It started inauspiciously. We had agreed with Jo and Greg that we would meet them early in the morning on our first day and to see the Grand Palace together, but had not determined any details. Their hotel was on the river, near the Grand Palace; ours was on the other side of the city, but near the BTS. Despite several phone calls the reception at their hotel were unable to find them in the register, even though we knew they had booked in, so we were anxious as to whether to travel to their hotel or to the Grand Palace.
We set out for their hotel. We took BTS to Siam and interchanged to the other line towards Saphan Taksin station to catch the ferry up the Chao Pahyra river. On this second train we began chatting to a very friendly local. During the course of quite a long conversation he offered to direct us to the public pier from Taksin station. Feeling very overwhealmed by Bangkok and struggling to remember whether the pier was very easy or very hard to find from the BTS (I was sure it was one or the other) I stupidly agreed, before Ally had a chance to say otherwise. He ended up leading us to a little private pier somewhere near the Shangri La hotel and by this time I was a bit of wreck. It sounds very stupid and credulous on paper but this fellow was slick and enourmously charming. However, I knew pretty soon that we weren’t in the right place for the public ferry, but didn’t really know where we were and was panicking about how we would meet Jo and Greg.
We ended up paying an exhorbitant amount for a tour of the Klongs (the smaller waterways of old Bangkok) we didn’t want and were shown to a little longtail boat. Sitting on the boat, my reputation as anything like a savvy traveller forever destroyed, the water seemed much choppier than I expected, although my general feeling of unease probably made it worse. We could have taken the tour and minimised our losses, but we decided, instead, to cut our losses and just ask the driver to drop us off at the ferry stop we wanted. She dropped us close by but it took us another few minutes of stress and gesturing on a map with a helpful local security guard to determine exactly where we were. It was an expensive lesson and I still can’t really explain how it happened, espescially as I had read so much about the various scams of Bangkok.
Holding a grudge against the whole city we recouperated in Jo and Greg’s hotel room, and swapped war stories: they had had a bad experience with a tuktuk driver the day before, as everybody who catches a tuktuk in Bangkok seems to. We then caught the proper public ferry down towards the Grand Palace. At the ferry stop there were no signs, but we ascertained the direction and wandered down to the ‘big white fence’. Again, no signage as we tried to find the entrance, and when we did were set upon by guides offering their services and a fellow with a loundspeaker who would bellow at tourists he determined were not in accordance with the dress regulations. Jo was of his victims – her dress was sleeveless and the scarf she had brought for the purpose was deemed insufficient to rectify the sartorial deficiency. Very grudingly she borrowed, for a 100 baht deposit, one of the plain, less than flattering, grey shirts available for the purpose.
The Grand Palace was magnificent, but very busy and hot by the time we arrived. We were funnelled round a set route and at one point there was a sign warning that, for no apparent reason, once we passed through a particular doorway we could not re-enter and there was no turning back. Took some beautiful photos and I am glad we saw it, but we really weren’t in the mood to appreciate it.
We left and decided to see Wat Pho, just a few streets away. On the way several people standing near a empty small buddhist temple – I presume they were tuktuk drivers – came up to warn us that Wat Pho was closed, for a ‘Buddhist day’. Thankfully, we were now easily cynical to ignore such unsought advice and keept walking. After asking a rather confused young man outside the naval academy we found the rather grander Wat Pho. That it was open surprised us not at all.
Wat Pho is famous for its enourmous reclining Buddha, which really was an amazing sight, with stunning mother-of-pearl work under its feet. After a difficult morning we needed something to ‘Wow’ us and this was just the ticket.
We let the fates decide whether we head north on the river towards the backpacker ghetto of Khao San Road or south towards the upmarket shopping malls around Siam. Khao San Road won and we wandered around the night market, finding some little souvenirs and some dresses for Ally and Jo. It wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as I expected, but a little disheartening between the tourist tat, the tattoo parlours and the Western restaurants.
After saying goodbye to Jo and Greg, Ally and I had a quite cheap, and quite good, dinner at the Siam Paragon mall, which contains like so many of the Asian malls, a simply mind-boggling variety of designer shops.
The next day I woke up sore. We headed to Jim Thompson’s house, built by an eccentric American in the years after the Second World War from a collection of traditional Thai houses sourced from around the country. These one bedroom dwellings were bolted together to create a single house which highlights the beauty of these buildings. He became famous as a force behind the resurgence of Thai silk (especially when it was showcased in The King and I). Looked around the showroom – Jim Thompson is becoming a luxury designer brand in its own right – but we were rather put-off by the prices.
In the afternoon we headed to the MBK shopping mall, rather like an asian market spread over seven levels of shopping heaven/hell. Had an awful, but cheap, lunch at an all you can eat place which promised noodles and curry. Most of the curries, despite the labels, had no meat or vegetable matter but I found one with some promising morsels of what looked like beef. I hope it was tofu. Meat should have some sort of texture. Still we managed to fill oursevles on noodles and sauce for the equivalent of a couple of dollars.
The pain in my side was a little worse by this time, so we headed back to the hotel. In the evening we intended to see Victory Monument, a enourmous traffic roundabout just a few minutes from our hotel, but after walking in the wrong direction for twenty minutes, and Ally falling over on the uneven pavement, we gave up the search and found a little restaurant where we had delicious calamari, pork with basil (literally) and a green curry that I ended up picking the meat out of because of the heat.
My side still hurt as I considered our cursed couple of days and drifted off to sleep dreaming of appropriate punishments for the scammers of Bangkok.
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