6. Bangkok: Trains, bicycles, a boat and some tuk-tuks and modern-day dinosaurs!

Well what a change of pace, atmosphere, crowdedness, climate and safety hazards Bangkok is compared to the beach! Not unexpected but a change nonetheless.

Day 1

I am terribly proud of myself for working out how to use the trains - Bangkok’s are ‘sky trains’ built to run above the roads rather than under them like in London. I worked out, after a bit of trial and error (and even pressing the ‘English’ button on the ticket machine didn’t make anything much clearer!), how to buy my ticket (60p), which station and I wanted and then along came my train (which was air conditioned down to a marvellously cool temperature as a break from the 34° heat of the day) and off I went! On day 1 of adventures, I kept it simple with a walk round the massive park nearby park (Lumphini Park). The Thais have obviously recently had a big event there that they were busily packing up but still the park and the lakes are beautiful. Most excitingly though, it’s home to some excellent wildlife - the water monitor lizards. A cross between small crocodiles and little dinosaurs they stomp and swim about. I’m not entirely sure if / how dangerous they could be but they mostly seem to sunbath, swim and watch people, moving away if they get too close. Seems like quite an excellent existence really! Once I’d seen a few (having initially thought I was lucky to see one!), I started counting the sightings. A walk round half the park and I’d seen 22. Very cool!

I also went along to one of the many shopping centres for a fairly brief browse. I tried to get my niece, Ivy, something nice …. But soon realised that ‘nice’ is very difficult to come by so she can look forward to some of Bangkok’s best tat on my return instead. I’m sure she will be thrilled with my efforts! The shopping centre was on 8 floors, with a selection of clothing, electronics, bags and souvenirs. Beach shop selling one of those 4 things sold exactly the same as every other also in that category. They could have saved so much space and time and just opened 4 shops!

Day 2

Today was a day of organised adventures - a morning bike tour and evening tuk tuk one! My bike tour was brilliant. There was a group of 12 of us, each of us had a slightly rickety yellow bike and we followed our guide round winding alleys and streets. All of the people in my group were European. I don’t think the Asians really do bikes - especially not in Bangkok! The company was started, unsurprisingly, by a Dutchman. Both our guides (Prem and Mr Nine) were Thais and fortunately went at a relaxed pace that allowed for looking around and navigating the very narrow alleys, dodging scooters and various animals and people who don’t pay any attention! We were rarely on roads but if we did have to go on one and cross at a junction, it seems Prem (who was leading us) would take her orange baseball cap off and wave it above her head, Prem would whizz by from his position ‘bringing up the rear’ and get into the road and wave his yellow baseball cap around and this was a sign to start cycling! Seemingly, most cars stopped or at least avoided mowing us all down. Mostly a kind of start pedalling, swing into the road and hope for the best style of biking. Similar to the style my mother has been championing for years!

Once I’d got the hang of the weirdly unpredictable steering, the limited brakes (best to put a foot down if you actually want to stop!) and the way my seat moved on a slight spin if I turned in it, I was away. We cycled through China town stopped and walked though a big covered market (where you buy the flowers to make offerings to Buddha), over the river (via Memorial bridge), through temples and ‘Old Bangkok’. We stopped at Wat Kalyanamitr, which I imagine looks far more spectacular from the outside when it is not undergoing major external refurbishment. There we learnt how to prepare our closed lotus flowers by opening and folding them into a beautiful offering, then we learnt about how to make an offering to Buddha, in the temple which housed a massive, beautiful 16m high seated Buddha. We were shown the 8 different Buddha’s and learnt how each person has their own Buddha depending on the day of the week that they were born. At the temple, we also saw the monks at monk school (no photos allowed!). Every man in Thailand has to be a monk for at least 2 weeks and that must be before they marry. In that time they learn how to think less and talk less. Seems an excellent and well thought through preparation to me! We stopped in Old Bangkok for a coffee break (a can of iced coffee in a tin!) and got given snacks - banana, a sticky rice crisp cake a packet of crisps - all bought from the market. We also learnt about mangosteen fruit and how to eat them (quite delicious but very little actual edible part inside!). Finally, we cycled back along the river, stopped and looked at some more monitor crocodile-dinosaur lizards then got a little boat back over the river to return to the bike shop! It was excellent and really good to see other parts of Bangkok and learn from our very informative tour guide. At the end, I treated myself to a tuk-tuk ride home!

After my first trip, I had a quick dip in the pool then some time lying in the sun and then the air conned shade reading my book before I headed out for my next adventure - and tuk-tuk and temples tour by night! Off on the train (which I really think I've mastered now!) to the meeting point. There were 10 of us and 5 tuk tuks - I shared with Sasha, a fellow a Brit. We whizzed round in our disco lit carriages stopping by a couple of markets, temples and dinner. Our guide told us about the various different Thai street food and speciality wnd gave us all sorts to try, which we diligently did! We also went to a restaurant for actual dinner and got yet more dishes, which we had explained. Then on our way home through China town, we stopped for mango sticky-rice for pudding! In the flower market, we saw the workers making the night's select of floral offerings which will be bought as offered at temples, spirit houses and adorning vehicles and work places. It's just as well Buddha likes flowers otherwise the entire industry would cease to exist and all of those people would put be able to make a living. The orchids, jasmine, red flowers (often rose) and marigold are the main flowers used - (marigold for luck and prosperity - and they reflect the colour the monks wear, white jasmine for love and purity, red for love and the purple orchid, the national flower of Thailand is considered sacred).

Aside from some beautiful sights, we mostly just ate. A LOT. Constantly - almost every time we stopped. Our guide gave us:

For our start snacks as we walked through the street food market:

• Weird stodgy dumplings filled with something sweet (didn't quite catch their name but they weren't my favourite!)

• Thai pancakes made green and purple using different plant extracts

• A BBQ pork skewer

• A stick with BBQ sausage and noodle balls on

• Rose apple

• He also offered us a deep fried crunchy bug but I turned that one down!

At the restaurant for actual dinner

• Rice

• Beef pad Thai

• Prawns

• Crab omelette

• A dish where you get a leaf and make it into a pocket then fill it with: fired onion, ginger, raw onion, chilli (I skipped that bit), peanut, roasted coconut and then drizzle a sauce over the top then stuff it all in your mouth before it leaks out!

• Massaman curry

• Chicken broth soup

Dessert in China town

• Mango sticky rice with half a mango and drizzled in coconut milk

Day 3

For my final day in Bangkok, I had a little bit of time by the pool - the sunshine is there for about 3 hours when it's in between the massive skyscrapers surrounding us but given that about 30 minutes is the max I can sit in the sun, that's fine! After that, I headed off for a river boat adventure. I wanted to do a boat down the river so had read up; rather than get the tourist boat, I got the 'express' taxi boat that goes up and down the river dropping the locals (and tourists) at various piers. It's a viable form of transport here as traffic is so bad and trains don't always go that close to the river. I paid my 16 baht (about 30p) and off I went on my 30. Knute boat tour. Having saved myself the price of the tourist boat (4x as much as the express - so still not really that pricey!), I treated myself to a tuk tuk to a market for a final bit of souvenir shopping then got the train back to my bit of town.

I decided to treat myself to a final massage of my holiday. The ladies here work out of little shops and charge a little more than the one on the beach in Phuket (£12 for an hour it was. Scandalous!). On entry to the little shop, I had to take my flip flops off and got given some sliders to put on. They were approximately man size 12 so it was much more like trying to walk with dustbin lids barely attached to my feet. The lady then proceeded to walk me up FOUR FLOORS of stairs to the massage rooms. She showed me in and directed me to have a shower. A shower? Do I have to? She was definitely that I did have to. I had just clomped up 4 floors in challenging foot wear and 30° heat but I didn't actually feel a shower - or nakedness in a weird place - was necessary. I had a very brief splash shower and then put my pants back on and felt slightly worried that maybe it wasn’t actually a massage I'd booked and paid for? I'm not really in the main red light district at all but there is an undercurrent of that in a lot of Bangkok. I was having a little worry that I'd accidentally commissioned something quite different - especially since I'd been asked if I wanted a man or woman, and had said I'd prefer a female! While I think it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever take up prostitution, if I did, I probably would make people shower first!?

In she came having knocked to check I was ready and immediately turned the lights down to almost total darkness. I then attempted my 'please don't press too hard or yank my fingers / toes out of their sockets' requests but English was not her forté and charades were out of the quiestion thanks for the darkness, which was adding more to my worries about what was about to happen. Anyway, I lay face down and off we went. Fortunately - and although I was prepared to jump in with a quick 'no thank you' or, if needed, grab my clothes and run out of there, it was 'just' a massage. There were a number of times that after squirming, I had to ask for it to be more gentle. I think she was, kindly, trying to massage all my fatty bits away. But ramming her thumbs into my thighs and f'arms so hard that she almost got down to the bone, was not pleasant! She did the typical Thai masseuse thing of jumping up on the massage bed with me and sitting in various places around me in order to use her weight in her pursuit to rid me of my fat but beating it all into liquid! At times, as she moved my limbs into different positions to really get to the fat deposits, she seemed to think I was considerably more elastic than I am. when trying to manipulate my leg, bent at the knee and out into a right angle from my body, she did say 'relax'. It was a bit like when you go for a smear test and the nurse says 'relax' as you are lying naked from the waist down, with a stranger chatting to you, who's about to rummage about unpleasantly in your vagina to check you haven’t grown some cancer. There is literally nothing there to promote relaxation! Thankfully, she gave up attempting to realign my hips and just did that weird massage thing where they karate chop your muscles to indicate they're finished on that bit!

Not entirely relaxed but still, mostly, very soothing and enjoyable, I wandered back to my hotel, all shiny from the oil, and had a shower and commenced packing; working out how to reduce the weight of my baggage in order to get all my lovely souvenirs in within my luggage limit!

Avoiding the hazards

Prior to my tuk tuk tour, I had heard and read a few comments about the dangers of the tuk tuk. Some of the drivers do have a bit of a reputation for trying to scam you with initial lower prices then demanding more money etc but there are ways to avoid that and things to be aware of. The suggestion was that the vehicles themselves were dangerous to ride in so I did a bit of research to check - because I really do love a tuk tuk. In as much as they don’t have seat belts and are quite ‘open’, there is obviously more risk. However, they tend to go far slower than cars and travel at the side of roads / junctions. And in fact, it seems Bangkok’s roads are some of the most dangerous in the world when taking into account the number of incidents by population size. Enforcement of the few rules that there are is minimal and punishment for causing injury (or death) is low, especially if you are rich (the son of the Red Bull F1 owner is still yet to appear in court or serve any kind of sentence or punishment for killing people he hit when driving is his Porsche some years ago and another daughter of a wealthy businessman who caused the death of a van full of people received a minor fine and community service, which she has never done!)! Turns out, far from putting myself at risk on the tuk tuk, riding my bicycle and ever crossing a road was when I really took my life into my own hands! (Mum, you love a bit of additional reading - this is from 2017 but isn't much different still now! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38660283

I suppose given that any crash involving a scooter will most likely be a family of 4, none of whom a wearing helmets, or one involving an open back 4 by 4 will include up to 30 Thai workers all seating huddled into the truck or up on the sides like a bench, it's perhaps not that much of a surprise that the fatality count can be very high.

I spotted, and avoided several other potential hazards on my explorations too, including these chaps busily chainsawing massive log sized chunks of wood off a tree in the park - which they were just letting fall around the unsuspecting walkers below and also, this bit of metal work going on just over the unprotected pavement near where I’m staying! In addition to this, I've been informed by a number of locals that Thai winter commenced yesterday so I've had to manage that too! What this actually means is that the wind has 'got up'. It's a light breeze at best but has brought the day time temperatures down for 34° to around 28-30° and at night, it's even dropped to a balmy and very pleasant 27°, with forecasts later in the week to get down to 22° overnight. The Thais are going to have to get their coats out to manage that as they're often in a cardi even in the height of the day it seems! The locals says that sometimes, 'winter' only last around 7 days here but they're all hoping that get a few weeks at least...

However, despite all of that, I have survived. My most significant injury may possibly be bruises to my arms and legs, thanks for the powerful thumbs of the tiny Thai masseuse or a self#imposed one resulting from ridiculously heavy hand luggage, that I need to waltz into the airport with in an attempt to make it look light as a feather to they don't ask to weight it thus allowing weight for my splendid Thai purchases and fridge magnet treasures to come back to the UK! Tomorrow (Saturday), I shall make the dreaded 13 hour flight back to the UK. I'm sure it'll lovely and warm and dry on my return, just like Thailand!