I’d never visited anywhere in Asia before, so we took advantage of the journey from NZ back to the UK and stayed in Bangkok for a day.
We arrived late at night. It was very dark, very humid, very hot and lightning filled the air.
The next day was our full day in Bangkok; we wanted to see a bit of the city and take full advantage of the authentic thai food!
Our first rather exciting adventure was the Lumphini Park; an inner city park with lakes and grassy areas. Even though this park is surrounded by the city, it holds an extraordinary range of ‘wild’life….
First we saw lizards that were the size of alligators, called monitors:
then turtles…
Some very pretty white herons ….
and some rather scary centipedes that were 1 cm in diameter!
Following our park adventure, we joined a ‘Bangkok Food Tours’ walking tour to get the opportunity to sample the best local food. We visited 5 restaurants in total and enjoyed a wide range of Thai food:
First, delicious roast duck
then egg curry (one of my favourites)
then Tom yum noodle soup (Richard’s favourite)
then pork buns and custard buns (delicious), with thai iced milk tea (which is delicious; it’s thai tea, with condensed milk + ice)
then finally, we finished with thai chicken curry, which was very tasty. This was followed by coconut sorbet (yum).
We were quite full and needed a sit down after all the food, so we hired a man and his long-tailed boat to take us on a tour of the Bangkok canals. It was quite amazing seeing where many of Bangkok’s poorer residents live. Houses were built on stilts on the edges of the canals and many were at bizarre angles, having sank into the mud beneath.
The long-tailed boats are so-named because the propellers are mounted on the end of a long pole at the back of the boat. It seems that the size of the engine is of key importance!
After the tour, we spent time walking around the streets and visiting some amazing temples. This was fun and interesting. The journey back to the centre of town in a tuk tuk was far too adventurous for my liking and I don’t think I’ll be repeating that form of transport – the roads are absolutely manic here! The driver was on the wrong side of the road a number of times, eeeek.
Later we came across a shopping area and spent a while walking around the huge and varied foodcourts. We found this array of wonderful cakes 🙂
I think we made the most of our day in Bangkok. It is an amazing city and is certainly worth a stopover if you’re passing through.
Looks great. I’d really like to go Thailand to climb, but was thinking a stop in Bangkok might just be too much – people, noise, all the bad things you hear about on tv. Now I might make a stop-over there, especially with a food tour, and maybe a Thai cooking lesson.
a Thai cooking class was our first choice of activity, but it didn’t work out for one reason or another. Plus they take about 4 hrs, which would have limited what we could have done with the rest of our day.
An amazing place!
Thats just great you got some good photos there. If you ever head to the north of Thailand you can get a crazy long tail boat trip on the Mekong. Very scary!
Bangkok was where I first had coconut ice cream (it wasn’t available in the UK in those days). The tuk tuks don’t seem to have changed!