Day 3 – Bangkok

December 27th 2008

(Bit War and Peace this, we did do a lot this day but will be compressing things on later days, got a holiday to enjoy!)

Well the sleep that could've wiped the jetlag slate clean didn't quite materialise, wide awake at 5am but did manage to get back to sleep after a while. Up at 8:30am to meet “Miss Jenny” who I suppose was the equivalent of our holiday rep, an unexpected side-effect of booking aiport transfers. However, none of the hard sell here, Jenny turns out to be very pleasant, helpful, and is only interested in the tour we request to go on – more about that later.

We decide to give breakfast in the hotel a miss, £16 each is crazy money in Bangkok, and instead head off to Petchburi underground station for our first foray into Bangkok.

Bangkok's underground system only has 1 line, but it's very modern, air conditioned, has mobile phone transmitters in the carriages and our ticket, good for 7 stops and I reckon about 7 miles cost a whopping 50p each.

Stepping out at Hua Lamphong, Bangkok's main train station, you're immediately into what you think is the mad chaos of the city. Taxi and Tuk Tuk drivers all immediately offering their services. To escape, and conscious we still haven't eaten, we dive straight into Kafe Kafe, ultra modern Thai take on a western coffee house, cue pictures of Venice and the like on the walls etc – except I don't know of anywhere like this so it's very nice but a bit odd. Breakfast is egg, sausage, ham with (sweet) toast and butter, Sarah more adventurous with Pork Congee (a soup with rice and pork) – add in some drinks and for the sum total of £5 the £16 each at the hotel screams of daylight robbery.

Fed, watered, and armed with a plan we stride off stopping only for Sarah to have the first of many Asia style interrogations from a very friendly local who wants nothing more than to take an interest and practice his English.

First stop, The Golden Buddha, one of those Thai quirks, was apparently covered in plaster until they tried to move it, dropped it, the plaster split and they realised for the fist time that it was actually gold underneath! The Buddha is certainly very impressive, larger than life. We have to remove our shoes before going in, this turns out to be the norm at all such monuments and I'm certainly glad to have worn sandles! Looks like they're building a new home for the Golden Buddha, or perhaps it's in a temporary home at the moment, either way it'll be a more fitting place as at the moment the room is quite small.

Two more conversations later, the first a dentist from Chiang Mai, the second the local community policeman, a quick visit to a Chinese Buddha (another conversation) and we're walking into Chinatown. This is where the chaos of the train station seems like a tranquil stroll in the park. It is madness. The main street is crazy enough, thousands of people forced into single file as market stalls are setup on both the inside and street side of the pavement so perhaps best to get onto one of the side streets for a break? Not a chance, they're even crazier. More people, more market stalls, only this time there are still vehicles – including vans – crawling through spaces that are no wider than the vehicles themselves. We step to one side to let them through but nobody else seems bothered and we end up feeling like we've held the pedestrian traffic up! The whole thing is hillarious of course and we get back to the main road to carry on our slow journey. There does come a point where you start to wonder if the whole of Bangkok is like this, and if it is, how will we see any of it? Thankfully though it isn't, wouldn't have missed this bit of it but no desire to go back in a hurry.

We get to a clearer bit of road as Chinatown makes way for the Indian market area. Step into Wat Liap, which is incredibly pretty but is actually being used as a car park. As Wat novices you can't imagine anywhere would be nicer than this but of course there's a Wat on just about every corner and the really grand ones are to follow...

As the scale of our tourist map becomes clear we change direction and aim for the Golden Mountain which has been recommended to us a few times today and the guidebook points out that it has great views of the whole of Bangkok.

We walk past Wat Suthat to the Giant Swings which I can imagine is an impressive sight when they do make a swing out of it, which they do apparently, but is a bit of an anti-climax when we get there. As we sit and look at the map another friendly local comes for a chat, another itinerary is described in great detail, this gentleman is an English teacher which while reminding me that my Thai is non-existent does make me wonder whether his students actually learn anything useful, his English is pretty poor it has to be said. When he eventually leaves, and gets a safe distance away, we duly ignore his well meaning advice and head off in the opposite direction to the Golden Mountain.

The Golden Mountain is about as good a descriptive title as it gets. 300 or so steps around the outside of a small hill taking you up to another shoes off site with a huge gold dome on the top. The views from the top are extensive but you actually realise that Bangkok doesn't really have a spectacular skyline. There are the Wat's which are all low-rise, with some small skyscrapers in the distance. What you do get though is a real sense of just how incredibly vast Bangkok is. Much bigger than I was expecting, I don't know why, the population's more than London, but somehow I was still expecting something that would be easy to walk around.

Descending the Golden Mountain we head back to the main road with the intention of flagging down a taxi, our hotel is at least 6 miles away, perhaps more. Enter English teacher number 2, a wonderful older lady who simply walked up to us while looking at our map and asked what she could do to help. She runs us through our options and advises we get a canal boat – something we didn't even know existed. We walk with her for a while and she points us in the direction of the pier. This is real locals travelling and hasn't made it into our guidebooks for sure. Everything's in Thai with very few English words scattered around and it takes a while to get our bearings but somehow we figure out where we are, where we're going, and manage to pay the 25p each to travel the full distance directly back to within 150 yards of our hotel – it's a revelation and we're the only westerners on the boat.

Late snack lunch at the hotel, shower and change for our evening excursion. Pickup from the hotel and down to the river for our “Bangkok best seen by night dinner cruise”. Our driver drops us off an hour early but given the hit and miss traffic congestion this probably wasn't a bad idea. Gives us time to rehydrate – I was beginning to feel a bit wobbly at this point – in the River City shopping complex which is also air conditioned of course, which helps too.

The cruise itself is good. Buffet meal is better than usual for events like this we've been on previously and certainly some of the views are fantastic. The entertainment is, well, entertaining with a hilarious saxophone player who I genuinely think believed himself to be the most talented guy in Thailand. Maybe he was, who knows, but times must be hard... The lottery of who we'd be sitting nearest came out pretty well, we were placed next to a newly wed pair of Aussies who were pleasant conversation through the evening.

As the cruise was over by 9:30pm we had arranged for our driver to take us to the Night Market at Patphong rather than back to our hotel. Anyone who knows their Bangkok suburbs will be immediately familiar with the infamous Patphong and from the sheer horrendousness of it all we weren't disappointed. What was fairly shocking was that I thought I'd be insured against the constant pestering of the gentlemen trying to entice me into a “ping pong show” by having Sarah with me but no, we were both approached pretty equally. As quickly as we could we escaped down the next street which seemed much more friendly. Always a sucker for a cheap beer we entered The Balcony, where Chang (nice Thai lager, not quite Singha quality but good stuff) was 69bhat a bottle – about £1.40, not bad at all. Having been shown to our table Sarah eventually realised that we were the only mixed couple in the whole place (which was busy). Yes, the friendly side street was in fact the main gay bar street in town, from Canal Street to Soi 2 – it's a small world. Moving on we hit an Irish Bar imaginatively called O'Reilly's till closing time.

Haggled with a taxi driver to take us back to the hotel, got him down from 150bhat to 100bhat, then realised that was about £2 for a journey of 10/15 minutes, felt cheap, so tipped him anyway, and after a very long day indeed, finally to bed...