7/25/10 (bangkok)

Bangkok 

After a serious bout with food poisoning, I felt better and Annie and I were eager to do some exploring. We wanted to see the floating markets while in Bangkok. The markets are located an hour and a half outside of Bangkok and we coordinated a tour bus the prior day that would pick us up at 6:30am. We woke up at 6:00am and made it down to the lobby just in time to meet the van. Both of us were moving slowly. The bus stopped at two additional hotels to pick up a family of three from Bahrain and four from Penang in Malaysia. After a brief stop for fuel, we were on our way to the markets. Half of the van was filled with people doing a full day tour and half were doing a half day like Annie and me. Jackie, a middle aged Thai was our guide. He had a real name that was hard for the Westerners to pronounce and so went by Jackie. He was very enthusiastic and consistently cracked jokes during his monologue in the morning. I listened to Writing Down the Bones the entire trip. 

When we arrived, Jackie funneled us onto a fast boat. The fast boat was a ten minute journey to the markets. The boat navigated along narrow city canals made of concrete. Long tail boats raced passed rocking our boat as we navigated this concrete maze. It is similar to Venice but with an Asian influence. We arrived at the market dock and all hoped off the boat. I felt fortunate to still be dry after a wild ride. Damnoen Saduak is the name of the market and is the most heavily promoted market in Thailand. Lonely Planet describes it as “...wooden canoes laden with multicolored fruits and vegetables, paddled by women wearing indigo-hued clothes and wide-brimmed straw hats...” which is a fitting description. Jackie told us we had an hour and a half to explore and he recommend we catch a ride on a paddle canoe to better experience the market. Annie and I decided to do it right away before it got hot from the mid-day sun. We purchased a private boat for 600 Baht ($20 US) and stood in line to take our ride.

We have experienced many coincidental events during our travels and this day was no exception. During our first day in New Zealand, we meet a couple from England when renting our camper van. Later that night we bumped into them again during our first night camping and enjoyed a bottle of wine, several bottles of beer, and many stories over the next two days. Their names are Mike and Barbara. Barbara sends us updates every two weeks as to their whereabouts as they followed a similar route to ours. It turns out that on this day, Mike and Barbara were in Thailand and standing right in front of us in line. When we discovered them, we all got a good laugh. We briefly caught up before being escorted onto our canoe and agreed to catch up when we returned from our thirty minute trip. 

The canoe driver was an elderly Thai women who looked like she had been navigating these canals longer than we had been alive. The ride reminded me of going to the county fair as a child and riding in the bumper cars. The canal was log jammed at several points with long tail boats, canoes, and shoreline vendors. The majority of the time we spent jockeying with the other boats to move forward. While this market was very tourist oriented, it was fun to see the many vendors lining the shore with Thai trinkets and fresh fruit. We saw two elderly ladies with a large wok of cooking oil on a boat in the middle of the canal selling deep fried bananas. It was all a scene very unlike anything we have seen. After a half hour of jostling with all the other tourists on the boats our driver graciously dropped us off on the shore. Annie and I spent the next hour capturing the experience with photos and video. Unfortunately we missed our UK friends but connected in the evening to coordinate a dinner during our time in Bangkok. 

We met up with Jackie and were under the impression that we would head back to Bangkok. We planned to meet up with Pai, Chef McDang’s nephew for lunch but it turned out our fun filled tour was just beginning. Jackie had us going to the cobra show, the wood carving museum, and the gem factory all before dropping us off at our hotel. Instead of arriving at noon we got back at 2:30pm. Poor Pai had been waiting for us all afternoon. Both Annie and I felt bad to keep him waiting but Pai took it in stride. 

Pai picked us up and we headed to the Royal Palace only to discover by the time we arrived it was closed for the day. We instead decided to check out Wat Pho, an adjacent Buddhist temple. This temple is known for many things but the big draw for me was to see the reclining Buddha. The reclining Buddha is 46m long and 15m high and illustrates the passing of Buddha into nirvana. It was very large and worth checking out. After an hour exploring Wat Pho, Pai agreed to take me to the technology center to get a portable hard drive. I currently have used up roughly 2 terabytes of space holding my video and photos from this trip and desperately needed to back these irreplaceable mementos up. Pai took us to Pantip Plaza that is five stories of computer geek heaven. I purchased a new hard drive that gave me the space to back up my files. We were hungry after our big day and decided on Pai’s recommendation to eat dinner at Sunrise Taco’s near our hotel for some delicious Mexican. This turned out to be a very busy day and Annie and I were very tired when we retired to the City Lodge hotel.