Bangkok – It’s difficult to know where to start. We had intended to stay 5 days, but as we took the opportunity to apply for our Indian visas we ended up in town for 7 nights. Bangkok is a full on Thai experience – in a country with 64 million inhabitants, 6 million live in Bangkok! The next biggest city is Chiang Mai with just 200k – so it is really the only Thai city. The first observation is that the Thais know how to do “bling”. The starting point for a city of bling has to be a palace. Nicola and I did two palaces – one the Grand palace, by the river and the other in Dusit Thani. The grand palace is a collection of buildings in various different styles from Thai ‘wats’ (temples), to Khymer/Thai chedis/stupas (religious towers) to Italian style mansions – the theme throughout which is gold. Fully golden towers, golden rooves, gold paintings on the outside and then gold chairs, elephant saddles (now used as decoration), plates, ornaments on the inside. To bring the bling theme to an even more intense level – in between the gold items are jewels and stones, highly reflective glass and brightly coloured paints.
The second palace at Dusit Thani – was just as impressive – this palace’s building was in either a French or Italian style, but its real draw and bling content were the items inside. The king’s (now departed) mother has set up a college of artists to keep traditional crafts alive – and as only a queen can do – she has chosen the all the high end crafts. Making amazing creations in gold goes without saying – but the one craft that really grabbed our imaginations was using beetle wings for various things. No pictures were permitted in the palace – so I can’t us that medium – but basically – they breed beetles, let them die (they must die of natural causes or the colour of their wings deteriorates) and then harvest their wings, the beetles they breed have bright iridescent green, orange and blue wings. They then sort out the good ones and group them in the same colour – they then weave them in to rugs, stick them on statues (of all sorts of things – chickens for example) or on models of religious artifacts. Actually - I have just found this website – I think it is better than continuing to attempt to use my poor descriptive skills. http://thailand.prd.go.th/ebook/queen/content/content_chitralada.html
The next level of bling we observed in Bangkok were a couple of city high end places – we went to the Banyan Tree Hotel for a drink on their roof-top bar (on the 62nd floor). Unfortunately due to a wee bit of vertigo I only managed the one gin and tonic before all the blood drained out of my fingers as they held on too tight to the bar! We have a good Bangkok rooftop picture on the blog. We also ate out at a couple of nice places – one called Eat Me – an Aussie place near Patpong and another place called Spring, off the Sukhumvit Road (the main hotel road that runs through Bangkok). If anyone is going – both I would recommend, but Eat Me was a bit deer at more than GBP10 per main course versus Spring at GBP4! Much more our budget.
And the lowest level of bling – fake bling and go- go bars. To our shame we participated in one of the two – don’t worry mums – it was just a fake watch for Steven and almost a fake bag for Nicola – but Nicola couldn’t bring herself to buy it after all her years in the real luxury trade. We did go to the go-go bar area around Patpong, but just ended up in a live music venue, had a few beers and then met a couple of French guys who lived half the year in Paris and half the year in Bangkok and had just arrived the previous days. They were keen to get back in to the swing of things, so after a fair few beers and maybe a couple of tequilas we headed for a nightclub (somewhere in Bangkok) and danced the night away. I got home, but only just!!!
And then there is the opposite – the rest of Bangkok. It is a proper city as well as high end hotels, strip joints and palaces. We used the river quite a lot to get around – tried to go to a floating market, but it turned out to be a floating restaurant – poor Thai language skills lead to Nicola being served with a huge river cat fish for lunch – little eaten. We used the river to go up to the flower market, but that turned out to be only really in the morning and after the flowers leave the vegetables move in. We have some good pictures of huge bags of ginger, onions, garlic, lemon grass, chillies – all the stuff you would expect to find on your Thai plate.
We made extensive use of the BTS – the monorail system to get to from one end of the Sukhumvit Road to the other. The traffic, whilst colourful (all the taxi’s are painted the same bright colours that make up a pack of Opal Fruits, sorry Starbursts) was never ending, along with the taxi drivers keeness to stay off the meter meant we avoided them as much as possible. We did take a number of tuk-tuks, but this was more for the romance of them than their practicality – slightly better than taxi’s , but the heat and the dirt from the roads meant you arrived considerably more disheveled than when you departed.
Bangkok has a lot more history and culture than say Kuala Lumpur, but it has also developed a penchant for shopping malls. Though less needed due to lower heat and humidity than KL they are still a very relevant part of Bangkok life. We dipped in and out of them for various things – more good food halls and restaurants – but for quick food rather than a pleasant dinner.
On the morning of the eighth day we took an early morning taxi to Hua Lampang train station, bought our second class ticket for Phitsanulok and put the city of bling behind us.
