I feel one serious downside to travelling long-term (I am choosing conveniently to believe that anything over 100 days counts as long-term) is that you feel much less pressure to ‘see’ everything, and have much less reason to drag your sweating, lazy self out of bed and onto the stiflingly-hot streets. I am already feeling like this after just a few days, which made me glad that my travel buddy Philip felt slightly more urgency, as he had only 2 days left of his travels, and wanted to see as much as possible of Bangkok. I moaned at the time when he dragged me out of the aircon, but I am secretly quite glad (and it gave me leverage the following day when he was lazy and I was feeling more energetic).
So feeling motivated to accompany my brilliant yet also brilliantly-useless-at-directions travel buddy, we set off reasonably early to cover a few odd sights around town that Philip still wanted to see. Stop No.1 was of course 7/11 for the first icy cold bottle of water of the day, and for plasters for my toes which had not yet resigned themselves to the fate of flip-flops for the next 3 months. Stop No.2 was Wat Traimit.
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| I love seeing monks acting like tourists - but where do they keep their phone? |
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| Modern but still quite pretty. |
Whilst not by any means ugly, the temple has a distinctly modern feel with marble floors and parking spaces, and would not normally have been somewhere I would want to visit when there are many more atmospheric options in the city. However, this wat has a rather valuable tourist sight in the form of a solid gold Buddha image worth around $250,000,000. Originally encased in a clay shell, most likely to protect it from thieves or bandits, it was only discovered when the image was being moved by crane and accidentally dropped, cracking the clay shell and revealing the treasure beneath. For once, Thailand’s ‘Safety First Seventh’ approach actually paid off!
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| That is one expensive statue. |
It is a strange feeling looking at something so relatively small, and realising this is more wealth than I will ever own in not just one lifetime, but two hundred or more lifetimes.
...I felt incredibly poor.
...I bought some street snacks to make myself feel better.
...I felt even poorer.
...Street food was delicious.
After spending perhaps too long in front of a fan pretending to put our shoes back on (I had to put on new plasters, and felt it was important for my blisters to do a really slow, thorough job), we hopped on the Metro/BTS to Siam, which is Bangkok’s main commercial area.
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| Bangkok's crazy traffic. |
Before coming to Bangkok, I had never given much thought to the phrase ‘back-to-back shopping malls’, especially coming from a small town with only one mall (however did I cope!). But in Siam, the malls really are back-to-back, wedged side-to-side, jammed in every available block of space. The main reason is of course a enclosed shopping centre can be air-conditioned, whereas traditional shopping streets cannot. So Siam’s BTS station has signs for at least 6 malls which are directly connected to the Skytrain station, and there remains only small gaps between them which you dash across to reach more air-conditioned bliss.
After a pit-stop at Dunkin’ Donuts for some ice tea (my justification for the western brand this time is that I needed to break a 1000B note, and did not want to bother the lady selling coconuts on the street with such an arduous task) and a chance happening upon some harem pants that actually fit me, we bravely braved the blistering heat to head towards the towering Golden Mount.
This excursion offered the opportunity to try another of Bangkok’s more unusual public transport options; the khlong (canal) boat, which travels along one of the many waterways within the city. The piers for the boat are tucked down tiny, torturous alleys, which have become obscured behind shopping malls and modern raised highways. It was safe to say I was fairly excited at seeing Bangkok from a different perspective aboard what I saw as the dodo of the city’s public transport.
It all looked so calm at the pier stop.
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| The calm before the approaching storm. |
It was slightly less serene onboard.
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| A great way to see the city. |
Despite the driver’s obviously suicidal state of mind, the canal boat was an exhilarating way of catching a glimpse into the lives of the canal bank’s inhabitants, and only 9B (£0.18) each way.
Looming above the canal boat’s final stop is the Golden Mount, an elegant (obviously golden, everything in Bangkok is gold) temple perched atop an artificial mound swathed in green jungle. It was very easy to find, though less easy to find the path that led to the summit.
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| Apologies for the telephone lines here, they are very difficult to get around here. |
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| Mary Poppins' crash sight. |
At the summit of the hill, atop the temple building, was a huge golden tiled, bell shaped stupa that tapered elegantly into the sky, and was surrounded by far-reaching views of the sprawling city.
Sounds nice eh?
What I have not mentioned is that it was so hot by this point in the mid-afternoon that my bare feet were burning on the temple floor, and my phone overheated and turned itself off, much to my disgust, ‘for my safety’. So for much of our time in the temple, we were stood inside by a window looking out over the city where we discovered there was a through breeze. I did however manage to obtain a few reasonable photos.
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| If it's B&W, you know it's because I'm hiding a miserable sky ;) |
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| There was a bells theme here... |
The final tourist attraction that Philip wanted to see was neighbouring Wat Saket, so we wandered over towards where we thought it was situated.
I’m still not sure what we looked around was Wat Saket, as at times it felt like it was a convention centre or license office. It was pretty though.
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| I feel this says a lot about Buddhism... |
After all this cultural, sweaty tourism, we headed back by canal boat to Siam for some much needed hanging-around-in-aircon-mall time. We stumbled upon a huge tourist souvenir section, which saved us a souvenir shopping trip to Khao San Road (the backpacker ghetto). Whilst I would usually prefer to buy more locally, there is little option to do that in Khao San or anywhere else in the city, and I’d take a shopping centre anyday over the hassle and stress and ‘Sir, you want suit? You want suit! BUY SUIT!!!!’ of Khao San.
And I definitely didn’t go back to Dunkin’ Donuts for more ice tea - definitely didn’t do that.
Evening consisted of napping, eating, photo editing and sleeping early.
Tomorrow - markets and couchsexing couchsurfing.
DSP
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