Bangkok Day 3

Monday Sept 27, 2004

For breakfast we went to a restaurant just up the street for a continental breakfast, then over to Starbucks for coffee.

There are a huge number of taxis in Bangkok , and all the places I went for that matter. I suppose a lower percentage of people there own a vehicle, so more taxis are supported. They were very cheap too. The taxi rides were 35 Baht (about 90 cents) for up to 2 km, and a cheap rate after that too. A 20 minute taxi ride was probably $3 or so. However, that’s only if you get them to use the meter, and most of the drivers try to pre-negotiate a price with you instead of using the meter. And, no surprise, the pre-negotiated price was always above what the meter ended up reading. Gas and car maintenance must be pretty cheap for those taxi rates.

After breakfast I headed off to try a river boat ride and see the Grand Palace , while Bill did some of his own things. I taxi’d to the Tha Si Phraya public boat stop on the Chao Phraya river. According to a sign there, different boats went different places, some didn’t stop at the Grand Palace stop. An attendant indicated a particular boat for me, but according to the sign that boat wasn’t right, so I didn’t take it. She was right and the sign was wrong, of course. I caught a later one. The boat ride was interesting, and afforded a new view of the city.

Passengers loading and unloading on the river boat.

A pagoda from the river boat.

I enjoyed the ride. Here’s an AVI video of part of the ride. FYI, regarding your connection speed, the videos in this story are from 1 MB to 5 MB, which is 4 to 20 times larger than the large pictures.

After the boat ride, I stopped and pulled out my map and was figuring out how to get to the Grand Palace when a friendly local stopped and started talking to me. He was polite, and spoke English well. When I said I was going to the Grand Palace , he said it was closed for a couple more hours, but I could go see a few other sites and come back. He made a special arrangement with a tuk tuk driver to drive me around to three other places, wait for me at each one, and then bring me back for only 75 cents. That all sounded good so I got in and started going. Then I remembered that I had just read in the Lonely Planet guide book that a common scam was to tell people the Grand Palace was closed when it wasn’t, route them to other sites, and get a kick-back on the entry fees. So that was a few blocks later, and still in front of the Grand Palace , so I told the driver to stop. I had to repeat that a couple times pretty forcefully before he stopped. Then I paid him 10 B, and he tried to get me to give him the 30 B, and I just walked away. 10 B is a pretty good deal for him for a 3 block ride.

As I approached the entrance to the Grand Palace two more people said it was closed, and that I should go see something else first, and that they had a suggested destination. The Grand Palace is surrounded by a big wall. I saw a gap in the wall and headed for that. A woman stopped me near the gap, and she said I couldn’t go in, but I’d had enough of that. I thanked her politely and smiled and turned and tried to walk in anyway, but a military guard with an assault rifle motioned me to stop. Him I believed! That wasn’t an entrance for tourists. So she was actually a Grand Palace employee probably. I felt a little foolish because she had actually communicated pretty well what was up, but by that point I just wasn’t believing anything anybody said, I guess.

The Grand Palace was amazing. I saved $4 by not getting a guide, but therefore missed out on the histories and meanings of things, so I can only share some pictures. I paid for guides at the rest of the sites like this that I went to.

There’s a weapons museum (or two) in the Grand Palace , which I enjoyed. It contained a Colt revolver rifle presented to King Rama IV by Sam Colt himself, and a flint lock musket with a 6 foot barrel. No kidding, 6 feet, and that’s not including the stock.

The Temple of the Emerald Buddha was amazing for its opulence, and the Buddha itself (said to be carved from a single piece of jade I think) was impressive to see. You took off your shoes and went in and sat down so you could look at the temple and Buddha statue. A tourist in front of me was told by an employee to change the way he was sitting. You’re never supposed to point your feet toward the Buddha statue and he had been sitting with his feet in front of him.

It was a really hot day, I guess upper 90’s. Every book and sign said you couldn’t wear sandals and shorts, so I wore pants and shoes. Unfortunately the only socks I brought were day-hiker socks that in retrospect are way too warm for that climate. So my feet were about 3 million degrees, and I was sweating about a quart a minute, all through my feet. Then I looked around and everyone else was wearing sandals! Not flip-flops I guess, but nicer sandals.

After the Grand Palace I tried to call Bill to make dinner plans. I asked a girl in a tourist information booth how to make a call, and she said you buy a phone card. So I found a shop (a 7-11 I think), bought a phone card, and tried to make the call. The phone LCD popped up two menu options, both in Thai. So I tried them both, no luck. So I tried various sequences and timings and area code or not, etc, with no luck. When I asked the tourist info girl again, she came out and tried it too, turned out that phone was not working! The next phone over worked fine, as it had no menus to read.

Next I had lunch at a little street vendor in a market, and then headed to Wat Po, another temple. This time I got a guide, and it was well worth it.

Then I went across the street to Suan Suranrom, a good sized park. There were lots of runners circling it, a weight lifting area, and a Foot Reflexology path. It had many small rounded stones embedded densely in concrete such that the stones stuck out a particular distance and exposed a side of a particular sharpness. People were walking around it barefoot. So the different sections essentially massage your feet to different degrees due to the stones sticking out, or so it appeared. I tried it, and it’s more like the different sections torture your feet to different degrees. I didn’t want to look like a pansy so I gutted it out for a few sections, but got to a section where the stones were a little further apart and had sharper (but still rounded) ends sticking out, and it was too painful, I had to bail. About 15 minutes later my feet were still hurting.