Bangkok: The City of Angels

I can’t get to the bottom of Bangkok, and I never will.
Lawrence Osborne

Greetings from Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit, abbreviated by locals to Krung Thep (the “CIty of Angels”) and colloquially known around the world as Bangkok.

The full title holds the record for longest place name on Earth and roughly translates as “the city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarma”. You can hear it recited by a local here.

Our main reason to visit Bangkok was to see Fabian and Nooch (Steffi’s nephew and his wife). We weren’t sure what to expect from this famously hectic city and only had four days to spend, so we split it up and gave each day a theme:

Day 1: Arrival and Alex’s day as tour guide (exploring Talat Noi)
Day 2: Fabi and Nooch
Day 3: Steffi’s day as tour guide (exploring Bang Krachao, Bangkok’s “Green Lung”)
Day 4: Obligatory tourist stuff, date night in the evening

The highlight was catching up with our far-flung family, but all four days were spectacular and all so different. Thank you Bangkok, beguiling City of Angels, you have woven your magic and left us wanting so much more. We will be back!

Getting there

We had a bit of an adventure getting off of Ko Bulon Le, but one way or another we managed to get to Trang in time to hop on our overnight train.

Trang to Bangkok is around 850km. We opted for the “fast” train, which covers the distance overnight in 16 hours 30 minutes … as opposed to the “slow” train, which takes about an hour longer.

Hide and Seek

We had booked an AirBnB in Chinatown and Nooch smartly suggested we find somewhere a little less … intense. (This was a good call: we later visited Chinatown, it is amazing but full on.)

So instead, we booked in at Hide and Seek near Phra Khanong station, and it was the perfect launching pad for us. The local streets and markets offered plenty to explore and the location was central enough to get everywhere we wanted to go without much fuss.

Alex’s day: Talat Noi and Song Wat

Alex had read a few pieces online which suggested that the district of Talat Noi might be worth exploring. On the river and just to the south of Chinatown, the area is an archetypal historic melting pot, with centuries’ worth of blended influences from cultures from Portugal to China to Thailand itself.

The train from Trang pulled in to Bang Sue, Bangkok’s central terminal, at 9:30am on a Friday morning. After checking in to Hide and Seek and Alex visiting the local barber for an emergency shave, we set off to see what we could see.

From the Hua Lamphong metro station, we headed southwest towards the river. Talat Noi has a labyrinth of interconnecting alleyways, overgrown with potplants and shadecloths, the citizens overflowing from their tiny houses and workshops and living their lives in the eddies of the street.

We knew we were heading for the river but that was an arbitrary target and it was the journey that mattered, not the destination: we took left or right turns down any alley that looked interesting.

We discovered historic streets, temples, hidden alleyways, street art, and some of the best coffee of our trip so far.

Fabian and Nooch

The next day was the weekend and we caught up with Fabi and Nooch. We went for lunch at a place we had seen the previous day, on the river at the north end of Talat Noi.

After that, we strolled through the alleys of this amazing place and wound up at our new favourite spot, Hong Sieng Kong, an antique warehouse / jazz cafe / restaurant / I’m not sure what, with a courtyard on the river.

Lots of laughs, good food, good company, watching the sun go down over the river in this amazing city. Thank you Fabi and Nooch for the best day!

Steffi’s day: Bang Krachao (Bangkok’s “Green Lung”)

Together with exploring Yogyakarta’s old town, this was Alex’s favourite day of the trip so far.

It was Steffi’s turn to play tour guide, and she had heard on the grapevine that the best place to explore in Bangkok was its “green lung”, Bang Krachao. It’s called the green lung because the shape it makes in the bends of the Chao Phraya looks like a lung, and it’s green, very green.

We didn’t have much information other than to catch the ferry over from the Wat Khlong Toei Nok Pier, and that we could hire bicycles on the other side.

After hiring your bike, the best way is to go clockwise. This allows you to start on wide roads and get a feel for the island, conditions, traffic – and your abilities on a bike. This last bit becomes important later on.

About halfway around the circuit, you come to a busy intersection. Our plan was to head right, the most direct route back to the bike hire and ferry, but traffic was so heinous it scared Alex and Steffi let alone Finn. So we decide to keep heading west instead, and go up that side of the island. What luck! If we hadn’t encountered that snarling traffic we would never have discovered the best part of the island.

Above Wat Bang Krachao Nok is where it gets really interesting. The jungle closes in and the concrete path narrows and rises above the wetlands underneath. The path passes through villages that time and the postman forgot, and winds its way through dense tropical forest. This section of the island is only about 1.5km long, but there are so many twists and turns and corners to explore and photos to take, the hours escaped us and we had to dash to return our bikes before the shop closed.

Steffi did a highwire juggling act of filming while cycling, avoiding stray dogs, greeting locals, watching out for Finn and somehow managing not to fall off the path. There’s a quick video below:

Video from our day on Bang Krachao

Tourist day

We took a ferry up the river to see Wat Pho in the city centre, and the Reclining Buddha within; here we discovered the crowds we had somehow managed to avoid thus far in Bangkok.

The queue to get in to the Reclining Buddha was around five hundred people long. It moved quickly and after about half an hour we were in, but then we had the opposite problem. Urgency depends on which side of the door you are on, and there was just no space or time to reflect on the size of the buddha or the significance of this place, before we were squeezed and pummelled and factory-lined out of there so that the next five hundred could nudge and elbow and click-click-click their way through.

We had lunch at the Deck, on the river near Wat Pho, thanks to Nooch for a great recommendation. The food was delicious and the view across the rover to Wat Arum and surrounds is spectacular.

It was here that Steffi had the experience that every visitor to Thailand must have, which is to overestimate their ability to handle spice. Steffi ordered the papaya salad, which looked delicious. The waitress paused and asked, “Madam, this is a very spicy dish, how spicy do you want it?” Let me stop here and say, if a Thai waitress stops to ask you how spicy do you want your food, take it as a sign. But Steffi took it as a challenge, ignored sage advice and insisted casually, “Oh, just make it how you make it”.

There was sweating, there was laughing, there was fanning, there was crying. Poor Finn didn’t know what to do but he hugged Steffi with all his little heart and said sagely, “Just close your eyes, Mummy … and drink your beer!”

Date night

Steffi’s Sydney crowd (“the Girls”) shouted us a night out in Bangkok as a birthday present for Steffi. We went to a rooftop bar looking out over the Bangkok skyline, Finn tried the squid ink spaghetti and laughed hilariously at his blacked out mouth. We staggered back to our Hide and Seek late, after a night well done.

Thank you Girls for the delicious dinner and a wonderful night out!

Impressions of Bangkok

Bangkok was full of surprises. Yes, it was hectic – as any big city is – but in the corners and the edges there are pockets of infinite variety, where you can retreat into the calm, enjoy a good coffee and watch the world go by.

One surprise was the struggle to get anywhere from anywhere: most big cities figure out one way or another to facilitate movement and commerce. In Bangkok, road and highways are giant snaking parking lots, traffic sits motionless, engines idling, red light green light, going nowhere. It’s a city-wide exercise in zen. The trains are good, but coverage is limited and the two different providers (the Skytrain and the MRT) require different passes and walking between nearby stations. There just seems to have been a complete lack of planning or care for how citizens might move around their city. One happy side effect of this inconvenience is that neighbourhoods are more localised than in other cities, because it’s just so hard to get anywhere.

Another big surprise was how clean Bangkok is. You just don’t see rubbish on the street, at all. This was the first Thai city we visited, but we saw the same later in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai: these cities are spotless. It also makes the rubbish on the Thai islands all the more perplexing.

Perhaps the best word to describe activity in this complex, beguiling, multi-layered city is weaving: weaving through traffic, weaving through crowds, weaving powerlines together above the street, weaving through the bureaucracy, weaving through alleyways and markets and conversations.