Contrasting Bangkok

Bangkok is a typical city – it has typical Thai traffic – tuk tuks, taxis and mini buses all flying around all over the place together with the normal people on their scooters and motor bikes.  The streets are filled with people and street side market stalls selling all sorts of bizarre things – some we could identify (kids loved the deep fried chicken feet just sitting on a plate!) and plenty we couldn’t.

That’s the thing we found about Bangkok – it is sort of a mixture between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in that it’s a really modern city with skyscrapers and 5star hotels and these incredibly big, clean and shiny shopping malls but you step outside and you’re straight in a street market selling anything and everything with rubbish all over the place and you’re back in Asia again.

We had a couple of things we wanted to see while we were here which were both temples – Wat Phra Keow (temple of the emerald Buddha) and Wat Pho (temple of the reclining Buddha).  I knew that dress had to be respectable and that pants should be below the knee so I wore pants that were mid shin. 

When we arrived at Wat Phra Keow you have to walk through the uniformed “fashion police” who check to see if you’re ok.  We walked through fine and lined up to buy tickets.  The ticket seller told us that all the children would be free, gave us the tickets and off we went. 

Then we ran into problems.  We had the second line of defence in the fashion police – they took their jobs very seriously we discovered.  They were not happy with the length of my pants and made me stand next to the “pants length measuring stick” which had the acceptable length marked on it in red – I was a about 2cm too short (I seriously considered unbuttoning my pants and pulling them down and just pulling my shirt down to cover the top to make up the extra 2cm!)  Anyway, I was told to go back to the entrance and get a sarong – free they said. 

Paul stayed with the kids while I went back and joined the sarong queue.  Half way along this I saw a sign that said that I would be required to deposit 100 baht for the sarong.  Typically I had no money, so I had to go back to Paul and get the 100 B.   He meanwhile, had been told by the fashion police that there was no way that Caitlin was free and he should go back and pay for another ticket (he was rather happy by this stage!)

I took my 100B back to the queue and this time got inside the door before I saw another handwritten sign on the door that said that the deposit had recently been increased to 200B!  I trudged back to Paul to get another 100B but he only had a 500B note – so I took that and went back into the queue – again..

Luckily, it was fairly short this time and I made it to the counter only to discover that they don’t give change but were more than happy to take my 500B.

I marched back to Paul and the kids and we lined up once again for the fashion police – just daring them to find something wrong with us this time! 

The kids had been standing around this whole time so you can imagine they were completely over the whole temple thing before we’d even gotten through the entrance gate, so we followed the signs immediately to the emerald buddha, ignoring the other palace halls etc.

We were a little bit culturally challenged at this point you might say, so when we took off our shoes and put them with the other million at the door to the temple and finally made it inside to be greeted by this tiny little Buddha on a pedestal – there were comments like – “Is that it?” and “We waited all this time for that?”

At least it broke our dark moods, as we made our way outside we were all giggling about how it would have been handy to have a telescope!

We spent a little bit more time looking around the grounds but pretty much called it quits on our day out at Wat Phra Keow.

We left it a couple of days before attempting our next temple outing to Wat Pho.  We went by river ferry, which was an excursion all on its own.  The temple was the complete opposite to Wat Phra Keow.  This time I had come prepared with a bag full of zip off pants legs etc for all of us, however when we got there, the admission was half the price and although there were signs reminding us to “dress appropriately” there were no police to enforce whatever that actually meant.

We walked straight in to see the reclining buddha which was absolutely huge and we were also allowed to take photos.  We all had a much better experience and the kids were suitably impressed by the giant buddha which had mother of pearl art on its feet.

We didn’t do any other sight seeing, just made our way around various parts of the city, including Kao San Road which is the backpacking capital of Bangkok and the Siam Centre which is made up of 3 giant multi-storey shopping malls.

Our hotel was near one of the canals that runs through the city and we caught one of the canal taxis that runs up and down between the shopping precinct and our end of town which was a government area.  We had experienced plenty of crazy tuk tuk and mini bus drivers but these guys have attended the Evel Kenevel school of boat handling! 

The canals are only about 20m wide and buildings are built right off the side.  They roar up and down at full speed, only slowing down when another canal boat comes from the opposite direction – and then both boats get flung about in each other’s wakes.  Each boat has 2 ticket attendents and when they fly into a stop, one of these communicates with the driver with a whistle while he throws a rope over a peg and then whistles when all the people have got on and off.  You have about 1 minute to get on and off and at peak hour, these boats are standing room only so getting 4 kids off a tossing boat was really interesting!

The canals also run under a series of bridges and we discovered about 2 minutes after we got on our first boat, that the driver lowers the roof to go under the bridge, so when we were standing casually on the boat, recovering from throwing the kids aboard without anyone falling in, suddenly the roof was collapsing!

We went on the canals a number of times so got a little bit used to it in the end but it was still pretty scary!  I hoped to get some video of them at peak hour as they really have to be seen to be believed but so far have run out of time.  I will let you know if I manage to get it recorded.

We are glad we’re now heading off back to the country to Kanchanaburi.