Tourism

Sunday January 8th
That was a long day!
Up at eight for breakfast at the hotel, nice Western breakfast for me. I don't know, I just don't see salad and fried noodles for breakfast, rice porridge maybe.
We walked and took a cab up to the Skytrain, which is an elevated train that covers a lot of central Bangkok. A really nice way to get a birdseye view of the city.
Our destination is Chatuchak market, one of the biggest outdoor markets in the world with 15,000 vendors in one or twoo square kilometers. If you can't find it in Chatuchak market, you don't need it, jewelry, antiques fabrics, plants, dogs, antique opium pipes, clocks, electronics, preserved insects, tools, farm implements, t-shirts. pirated CD's, you get the picture. We wandered around randomly for a few hours being tourists and the had a nice lunch of Tom yum gai soup and cokes.

After lunch we asked a cab driver to take us to a wat ( Bhuddist temple) where we could catch a water taxi on the Chao Phraya river. Due to some linguistic issues we ended up at the wrong wat. We didn't realize this immediately and wandered around a bit looking at the ornate buildings, which we soon realized was a crematorium. Paula was quite taken aback to realize that the figure in the glass case on one side of the courtyard was actually a preserved monk. At this point we (well Paula, as the rest of us had no clue where we were) realized we couldn't get to the water taxi from here.
This was followed by a rather long walk, consisting of forays in the direction of the river which were blocked by giant home renovation centres, chain link fences and conversations in mixtures of broken Thai and english with confusing results . At one point in our wanderings we found a sign pointing down a street indicating the pier for the water taxi. Success! In the end though we realized that the little girl playing ball in the street was  not yelling at us in Thai but was yelling "no boat, no boat"! Back up to the main road and more wandering. Eventually we did find  the pier and amused ourselves while waiting by watching Thais feed bread to the huge schools of river catfish which were swarming around the pier in huge numbers.

Travelling on the river is a great way to see Bangkok, lots of different water taxis, and fantail boats.  Fantails aver very  gracefull looking boats about 40 feet long and six feet wide with truck engines mountel like outboard motors on the back. The propellers are at the end of 20 ft long shafts. The boats are working boats designed to travel through very shallow water.  We passed under the Rama IX bridge which is a huge single pier suspension bridge. After a couple of stops in the taxi we took a a shuttle across the river to the east bank to see  Wat Arun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Arun ) . Wat Arun is one of the more famous wats in Bangkok, with several very large stupas ( towers whose spires represent Buddha's ascent into heaven) All the stupas at Arun are covered in fine stonedwork (corniches, sacred figures etc) which is faces with pieces and fragments of fine chinese pottery. The whole effect is very strinking  and makes you appreciated how much work must have gone into their construction. We were able to walk two thirds of the way up the largest stupas via some of the steepest and narrowest steps i have ever seen. At the top there are great views of the whole city and you can get some idea of how big the city really is.  After a rather rexhilerating walk back down the stairs, we had a coffee and got off our feet ffor a while. (I'm getting used to Bangkok prices, I thought three dollars was an outrageous price to pay for a coffee)

We  crossed back over the river to Wat Pho ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Pho) . Some of you may have seen this wat, its the location of the famous reclining budda. I'll have to let the pictures speak for themselves, it was pretty awe inspiring, even though it has the strangest toes I've ever seen.  The building itself iss pretty amazing too, the inside walls are all handpainted sacred images.

We decided at this point we were too tired to walk any more, so after some tough negotiations we got a tuk-tuk ride to a pad thai restaurant for traditional pad-thai, cooked over a really hot stove on the side walk. It was amazing, especially after all the walking and climbing.

A very memorable day, thanks to our intrepid tour guide Paula