Tag Archives: Thailand

Back to Thailand: Floating Market, Bridge over River Kwai and Tiger Temple

Right now I am in Kathmandu. I have been here in Nepal for several weeks already. The previous post on this blog deals with adventures in Vanuatu. In between Vanuatu and Nepal I crossed a few other countries. It sounds like a lot, but in truth the delay of my blog compared to my real time physical movements is not that large nowadays. The only large chapter that I had to skip for now is the one that deals with Australia. In fact I went there twice on my trip: first time for about a month after Indonesia and before New Zealand; and second time now after Vanuatu I stayed in Brisbane for about a week. I guess I will come back to Austalia at some later point in this blog when I have a little more time, but for now I will press on with the trip as it developed after Vanuatu.

From Port Vila I flew to Brisbane and from there on, changing in Singapore, I arrived back to my beloved Bangkok. I stayed there for about a week, did a lot of stuff there, reading books, planning my trip from there on, exploring the various hidden parts of the city – but it is difficult to report on this in a photo blog. One day I decided to play tourist and went for a day long tour of three famous tourist attractions situated to the West of BKK. This post is about that visit.

Attraction nr 1: the famous Floating Market
Strange as it may seem, in my many visits to Bangkok I’d never mastered the time to get acquainted with this quintessential Thai institution. There are several floating markets around Bangkok, this one being the most popular and the most touristic one. Frankly all of the stalls facing the waterfront are meant for tourists. And yet it is by all means a picturesque and involving spectacle.

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Hidden Bangkok

From Seoul I went to Bangkok. I love Bangkok! It is one of the most amazing cities in the world. Somehow things happen there easily and quickly, as if by themselves. I am not a beach bum, after half an hour of lying on an idyllic beach I get bored. The urban jungle though I can explore endlessly. That’s why if most guests of Thailand aim to leave Bangkok as soon as possible, my preference is always the opposite – all roads lead there and that’s where I want to be. I usually stay in the Silom area. This is where the interesting stuff is concentrated. In addition from Silom it’s relatively easy to get to any other part of the city, as this is where the metro and Skytrain lines cross. Having stayed there a number of times, obviously I know the hotels, restaurants and best massage places (the latter of key importance in BKK).

I’m sure many of you have been to Bangkok and have visited its standard tourist attractions. That’s why below is the story of a couple of less well known places which I visited this time around. Bangkok of course is full of weird and fascinating institutions. For example I was looking for some contemporary art galleries and found them on the fourth and the fifth floor of a huge shopping centre, otherwise devoted to reselling jewellery. It was pretty weird to walk around all these Indian looking people haggling over brilliants among the guards. On the street Thanon Thaniya, which runs parallel to Patpong, you’ve got on the other hand a gigantic shopping centre devoted singularly to golf. Thanon Thaniya is a Japanese island in the sea of Bangkok full of hostess bars and authentic Japanese restaurants. Sitting in the Moon Bar on the roof of 50-storey high-rise and observing the lights of BKK from the height of a landing plane, it was hard to imagine that all these places belong to the same city.

Chatukchak market
The largest of Bangkok’s markets is open on weekends. It is located by the Northernmost Skytrain station. It is gigantic and pulls you i with its charms. I don’t buy anything anywhere due to limitations of space, but even I was charmed into spending some baht there. A mass of people head to the market from the Skytrain station:

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