Every timewhen I am on vacation I say to myself that when I go back I definitely have tonote down the highlights, especially if the place is a first time for me.Usually I didn’t follow through with the plan, and it is a good thing that Ifind myself in the mood to do so today.
This tripis a very unique experience, not only because this is first time I’ve been toBangkok, a place always on my list of places to see, but this is also the firsttime I went on a trip with a girlfriend, EVER. We both work during the day,married, and we have rather different personalities, characteristics, andattributes, so we were both a bit nervous about this right from the start whenwe were coordinating our travel arrangements. After discussing our differentinterests, our options and different financial considerations, we agreed ontaking Thai Airways, staying at Park Plaza (4 star) and a common day-trip tothe ancient capital Ayutthaya. Nov 17th is a public holiday inSingapore this year so we left that evening and returned on Saturday evening.
The tripstarted with a delay of our flight. Who haven’t experienced a delay at theirair travel before but I found it rather shameless (or just irresponsible) ofthe airport authority to claim it as a flight “re-timed”. Not only our flightwas “re-timed”, we also had to wait even longer sitting there in our seats fora more extended time. Due to some recent situations at work I had a lot tocatch up, so I ended up working that whole day at home and on the plane somemore…but thanks to this further delay I couldn’t use my laptop until I was justdead tired. Goodie goodie at last we arrived safe and sound at our hotel beforemidnight.
When wewere just planning for this, I warned the friend that although I think ofmyself as pretty easy going, I do have certain habits/attributes that somemight find it intolerable. I am not a morning person, I am not tidy, and I amnot very big on trying new food. So while I can try keep things tidy or atleast only mess up areas allocated for my use, scheduling early morningactivities with me is not advised and don’t expect me to adventure on weirdstuff (I don’t mind to sit and watch on though). I don’t think any of this is asurprise to hear to my friend, but of course, it is best to first communicateexpectations.
On theother hand, my friend loves food and shopping for food, and massage (anotherthing I have little interest in…because at best I felt nothing betterafterwards and sometimes it gave me the backache that I didn’t have). So forthe first day, we went for our own things to do. My friend went to enjoy hermassage and a visit to the Erawan Shrine, and I went to visit the tailor shoprecommended by a colleague, and took the Chao Phraya boat trip.
The ChaoPhraya boat idea is what I found through online research. I have loved the ideaof a “hop on hop off” bus tour type of thing as a tourist new to a city, and Igot the idea from my first visit to San Francisco in 2007. I was eager toutilize the remaining few hours of my business trip there to do some sightseeing, and I found myself at the Fisherman's Wharf eventually, evaluatingwhich bus to take. It’s while there the hop-on-hop-off idea has really enteredmy mind. Since then I have also been advocating this idea to all my family andfriends who were planning a visit to Singapore because I researched and foundout that our Hippo Tour here is pretty good for this – I have even accompaniedmy relative taking it once. I like the idea that such service can offer thefirst time visitor an overall view of the city, and let them see with their ownideas what might seem interesting. No guidebook, no matter how good, can beatwhat we can see for ourselves is what I believe. Since these tours are usuallygood for one of two days that means you also can use it as your means oftransportation for the first days if you decide to get off the bus to explorecertain areas, and you don’t need to worry about how to get back.
I didn’tfind such bus service in Bangkok, but instead I found the Chao Phraya ExpressBoat service. It is actually part of their local public transportation system,but to make money on the tourist they have a class boat for the tourists, oranyone else interested in spending 130 Thai Bah for traveling the route thatcan cost a lot less if you take the commuter boats. The Tourist Boat offerslive guide in English and Thai, two additional stops not available with thecommuter boats, shows up at the same location every 30 minutes within itshours, and skips some commuter stops. You can also continue to take commuterboats using the same ticket after Tourist Boat hours for the rest of the day.Because at first I took the public boat by mistake, I actually got a chance tocompare the two services. My conclusion is, should I return there again andwanting to take another boat ride in such way, I will probably still opt forthe Tourist Boat – but not for the guide! I had no idea what the Guide wastaking about the whole time and she appeared an entire lacking of interest inher job anyway…but because not a lot of people want to spend 130 Bah for thisride, whoever pays for it is sure to have a seat or two to sit on, a veryappreciated privilege after a whole day walkabout.
Because wedidn’t leave the hotel early enough and we had some errands to do, including mystop at the tailor shop, I only had time to detour from the boat ride at theReclining Buddha Temple stop. When I was younger I always felt I would needsomeone to go with me everywhere to be able to enjoy my time. These days, to mysurprise I am able to enjoy the freedom of having some lone time all by myself,doing whatever I want whenever I want and just appreciating what’s around meand the experience. I guess this is one of the good things that come with one’sadvancing age.
Since I amnot specialized in writing about travels I’d just leave that to theprofessionals, so all I can say about the Temple is that it was absolutelystunning to me so I took many pictures just for the sake of it. I also happenedto remember bringing a camera with me for this trip. That evening, my friendand I met up and we hit two shopping stops and at least for me I was what youcan describe as “shop till I drop”…it had been days that I only had 6 hoursleep, and like I said I worked all day on the public day due to personalneeds…I even stayed up to finish a report until about 2am local time. So aftera whole day of activities and walking, half of it under blazing Sun, I reallywas just dragging my feet to take every next steps…OK it’s true this is also aresult of me slacking off from exercising in the last few months. Although wespent hours at the malls in the end I only scored a pair of platform shoes,because there’s no trying at the wholesale clothing market, and I have made itmy rule not to buy any clothes without trying (very tempted to break the rule).By the way, another thing to note is that we had street food near our hotel forbreakfast. Prior to the trip my friend already mentioned her fond of tryingstreet food, so I brought some medicine and a bottle of precious Pepto-Bismolwith me (precious because not available in Singapore or any sites I havevisited in Asia), just in case. I am happy to say that the food tasted GREATand more importantly, NO DIARRHEA! So good we went back on Saturday for 1.5bowls more each of their street style chicken noodles.
The secondday, Friday, we had to get up early as our day tour pickup was at 6:30am at thehotel. Another day starting up with just about 6 hour sleep for me. We both dida lot of research online for this tour, and we almost decided not to go becauseof the recent news of flood in the area. Anther reason why we needed toresearch a lot before hand was because of the different prices we found for thetour just by a first look. Eventually we decided to take a bus/minivan onlytour as we didn’t have time to hitch a train and the “return ride on a boat”option seems to offer less time visiting historical sites. It is also thecheapest and most time saving for us. We ended up signing up to a 1,000 Bah perperson package and we needed to make payment at their office (part of theerrands to run during the first day). After we made the payment in full, wewere just hoping that their bus would show up the next day as promised, and itdid.
We wereless than five minutes late (my fault) to the lobby, and the driver alreadyseemed kind of upset. And he spoke very broken English. We were hoping hewasn’t going to be our Guide for the day. We picked up two more people and westopped at this little rather “country looking” street. I am a big city personso any town-ish looking street seem like countryside to me, so I thought outloud to my friend that we are almost there. Pretty quickly I realized we haven’teven left Bangkok! The brief stop we had was near the Palace thing, which iskind of an outskirt area of the City but it was no country. The grumpy drivertold us “change van, change van”, and we waited at the little roadside dinnerthere with other confused and or grumpy tourists, and “handlers” who spokedifferent degrees of broken English. At the time we didn’t know where we wereand one of those men who spoke broken English asked for our receipt and took itfrom me and kept it…after about 5 minutes I almost went over to them to ask forit back in case they tried to stand us up. Maybe I should have had more trustin people, but really we had very little idea what’s going on and what’s tohappen. This reminded me of the time when we went to Chiang Mai/Chiang Dao anddetoured to the deep mountains to be with the tribal people for few days, Ithought about these people just sell us to the Burmese and we wouldn’t be seenagain.
Back to thestory, so while waiting at the dinner with this feeling of us potentiallygetting completely screwed, I said to my friend, as long as they put us on abus soon and transport us there and back today safely, I won’t be upset nomatter what kind of services throughout the day. Because what do you expect forjust 1,000 Bah? It’s probably not even enough for one way there if just two ofus, but this tour promises food and it includes any ticket price to the sites.So the rest of the day we spent hours walking about all sorts of historicsites…ruins of ancient civilization and glory. Again, the details on just howglorious was the Ayutthaya period, and how beautiful are the sites are not beprovided here, since I am sure there are whole library sections of thesealready written. After all the site is “only” named by UNICESCO as one of theWorld Heritage sites! All I can say is it was truly magnificent to me, and Iwas sure as hack lucky to be there!
It was alsosure as hack physically draining to walk (again) under blazing Sun all day onthis tour. So at noon I was very tired and hungry and closed to licking myplate at our shared lunch service. Perhaps the GORGEOUS French guy sitting atour four-person table was the reason why I didn’t. I didn’t give him a goodlook until my friend kept mentioning about him and now he and wife sit in frontof us. This guy really is blessed by lord thy god in the looks department. Helooks like one of those models in magazines, with those baby blue eyes…OK…soanyway…we did something kind of embarrassing as we sat there talking aboutthem, while they…at least the guy had attended some Chinese lessons in Beijing.These days the world has become so flat now that even when East meets Westyou’d have to be careful not to think your mother tongue forms some kind ofinner circle code between you and your kinsman, as I happened to have learnedsome French myself too. Who knows, who knows!
After lunchwe all had a long nap on the way back, making just one stop at a site. Thefunniest thing (funny to me) I saw on this tour was that at one of themonuments around a past king’s statue there were a lot of roosters…and therooster statues got bigger and bigger as we drove around the circle. Outsidethat historical site there are a few shops selling souvenir and what not, andthey also have many rooster statues for sale, and they are all at the front ofthe shops. Some are two meters tall! It somehow reminded me of this episode ofFlight of the Concords where they were at this club, hoping to pick up women,and found that on the dance floor all they had were men. They wrote a song forthis part that goes “too many dicks on the floor, too many dicks…” which wouldbe also suitable for this scene if you only change it to “too many cocks…”Waking up from my nap, I found the driver letting off everybody else but me andmy friend. Since morning this guy had been mentioning to us about his plan tosee a doctor and our hotel. I never could really understand what he was tryingto say. My best guess is he had a doctor’s appointment around the time of ourdrop-off, and he needed to make sure we got back on time by someone else so hekept “discussing” with us some details about our hotel so he could relate thatto the taxi driver he later hired. This guy coughed a lot and he kept pointedat his chest trying to tell us about his condition. I was pretty scared at thepossibility that he just might have TB and I sat all day next to him. He was agood driver though, driving at a reasonable speed and signaled all at the righttimes. In general it was a good experience for my 1,000 Bah. The tour companyis called Vega Travel.
We gotback, had a change of clothes. We went our separate way again for a few hours.I needed to go to the tailor and do a fitting. Afterwards I thought I’d stop byChit Lom BTS and give shopping another go. Before I eventually scored some moreshoes, I bumped in Red Shirt protest! At first it felt exciting and I filmedand took pictures. And then I came to my senses of the pending danger, seeingmore and more police and their gears showing up the area so I get out of there.Later we went for dinner and drinks at Nana. Our hotel was a five-minute walkto Asok BTS, and that’s one of the main reasons why we chose it. We had areasonably priced and enjoyable light dinner at this restaurant called Suk11.They featured outdoor seating and sort of exotic bamboo décor and woodenstructure, with lights looking like soft torch lighting. The only pitfall isthat they also featured a lot of mosquitoes, and later I counted about 10bites. So we got out as soon as we had finished our food and moved on to TheAustralian Pub & BBQ at 37 Soi 11, at my friend’s suggestion. I ratherliked the place…it has a good setting and not seedy. We had a couple of drinksand off we went. The next day was just wrapping up and returning home…and luckilyit only started to rain just before we got in our taxi to the airport. Thisconcludes my first trip to Bangkok and I am pleased at its many highlights insuch a short time.
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