After the red-eye flight of nightmares, topped only by the Perth-Sydney flight that almost killed me, I got off the plane in Don Mueang airport only to join another insane queue for immigration control. The queue grew and grew behind us as we were the first scheduled flight of the day and I quickly became glad I hadn’t arrived even 10 minutes later than I had.
I eventually got through immigration, no visa needed in advance for a change, and proceeded to the toilets for a change of outfit and quick charge of the phone (no charging ports or entertainment (not even a chatty 84-year-old!) on the Thai Air Asia flight).
I wasn’t going to Penny’s until about 8 (it seems a bit rude to show up at someone’s door any earlier in the morning than that), so at about 6am I got a metered airport cab towards the city with the aim of getting there for sunrise, which was set to be underway at about 6:29, so it was a slight race against the clock.
An article online had recommended Lumphini Park as a good place to watch sunrise from, so I’d directed the cab there, despite a slight communication struggle when they asked me which part…
Errr… any?
As I walked into the park with my 20kg suitcase in tow, Bangkok hit me in the face. I felt like I’d interrupted a marathon or mass running event as dozens of runners came towards me, many of them fully drenched in sweat, which was hardly surprising given the intense humidity and heat (for an English person). I navigated my way through bodies and stray cats, passing group exercise sessions for people of all ages but namely more senior citizens. Ollie video called me just as I was making my way through the madness and shared some of the experience with me.
I tried to get a peak of the sunrise but it was largely hidden by trees and buildings, so I kept walking and found the metro system to take me to Penny’s condo building, which was right behind Khlong San station and I was at Sala Daeng.
You have to buy metro tickets for each stretch you do on a certain line unless you have their Oyster/travel card equivalent, which I didn’t have. So it’s a bit stop-starty and I had to use the lifts at each station (which at least existed!) and just lug my beast of a bag to street level.
I got to Penny’s condo building, the Supalai Premier, just before 8am and waited in the lobby for her to come down and let me in.
Thankfully, I had a singing Santa Claus to keep me company while I waited.
Penny appeared at the glass doors and we hugged and greeted each other. Neither of us can work out when we last saw each other but either way, it had been too long! It doesn’t help that I’d moved a few hundred miles west of London and she’d moved several thousand kilometres south east.
Penny documented my arrival with my slightly unhinged look for the benefit of our mutual friend Hannah, who we arranged to FaceTime later in the day after she’d had a night’s sleep.
Penny kindly made me a cup of coffee and I had a shower to freshen up before we formulated a plan for our day and hit the big city lights of Bangkok.
Bangkok’s Green Lung (Bang Krachao)
Penny recommended that we cycle around an area known as the Green Lung of Bangkok, a step away from the chaos. We started by getting a taxi to a little passenger ferry that just goes back and forth across the river and takes about 5 minutes.
to the Green Lung area
We hired some bikes from the ferry station at the other side of the river (M Bikes), which cost no more than £2.5 each to hire for the day, and set off towards our brunch destination, Coconut Lane.
of the Green Lung area
It was a 5km cycle to our brunch destination, so by the time we got there we had quite the appetite. Especially me, since I’d been up since 3am 😂 and it was now 10:30.
with scrambled egg to share
We ordered some drinks and food and sat back and enjoyed the view from our seats. It was a bit off the beaten track and looked over a sort of orchard of some kind, with irrigation streams/channels winding around it.
Penny said it’s somewhere she’d stumbled across and really enjoyed it, and I could see why. I had a passionfruit smoothie that was absolutely to die for and the food was delicious. It also doubles up as a hotel/hostel.
We left with very happy and full tummies and set off for our next destination – the floating market. The cycle paths off the roads were impressively accessible and clear and apart from a few dicey bits where you’re effectively on a concrete boardwalk over a swamp and only one side has a railing, it was pretty easy going. Sadly, the water is quite polluted and we’d often see lots off floating plastic and crap converging at the water’s edge, which was sad to see, but where do you start in a place like Bangkok?! It was a far cry from the impressively clean waters of WA, Sydney harbour and north New Zealand.
However, we did see some monitor lizards on our way!
Bang Nam Phueng Floating Market
Next we cycled to the Bang Nam Phueng Floating Market, which was actually just a market with one floating stall, but it was entertaining nonetheless. Honestly, it was so overwhelming and confusing that I didn’t take many pictures while in there. I think it’s just one of those things you have to experience because there’s so much going on and you often have no idea what you’re looking at anyway. There was lots of deep-fried and battered mystery food and interesting smells coming from this and that direction all the time. You can certainly smell when you’re near a durian fruit. It’s an acquired taste/smell and is often prohibited from inside buildings like hotels owing to its pungency.
Maybe the ‘floating’ in the name refers to the smells wafting and floating through the air?!
Asiatique the Riverfront
We stopped briefly to have a look at Asiatique the Riverfront which comes alive at night and is full of shops and restaurants. We were there in the daytime and most things were shut, but we could see its potential as an evening venue.
The waterfront was cool and it was almost like being back in Greenwich, with a big dirty river and nice ship to distract you.
We walked away from the water and back towards it to get to the ferry to take us to Wat Arun, arguably Bangkok’s most famous temple.
It turns out you actually take the Chao Phraya Express Boat up to Tah Tian dock and then take a separate little ferry that just goes back and forth from Wat Arun exclusively.
Wat Arun
Wat a place. I mean, what a place. Absolutely rammed with tourists, of course, and under the sweltering sun it was quite intense as the walls around it prevent any sort of breeze penetrating the sacred confines of the mosaic-laden temple grounds.
Because of its sacred nature, certain items of clothing are prohibited and you can’t walk in with your knees and shoulders bare, so we both donned sarongs and made ourselves ultra fashionable. I wore mine over denim shorts and Penny wore hers over the bottom half of her playsuit.
The decoration of the buildings is full-on and the overall effect is quite spectacular and awe-inspiring, but when you break it down into bitesize chunks it’s a bit kitsch and bonkers.
Lots of tourists hire traditional outfits and treat the whole thing as a photoshoot, which gets a bit annoying after a while because you continuously have to duck or weave around these frankly cringeworthy photo-ops.
So we did our own.
Once we’d finished admiring the extravagant and busy Wat Arun, we hopped on the ferry back over the river for something to drink at another of Penny’s stellar recommendations – the Eagle Nest Bar.
Eagle Nest Bar
It has a rooftop terrace that opens at 5 and we were a bit early, so we slummed it on the ground floor and sipped a cocktail (Lucy) and a soda (Penny). I ordered one called a Bangkok Sling because when in Rome/Bangkok…
The clock soon struck 5 and we were allowed upstairs to the rooftop bar. We assumed that since we were upstairs by 5:05pm that we’d safely be the first ones there, but alas, there were already other people up there who’d bagged the front-row seats to the river. Little did it matter as we still got cool seats around the edge. Interestingly, the drinks were slightly more expensive upstairs owing to the slightly higher view over the river. It’s as if they, too, had climbed the two storeys. I was pretty peckish by this point, but I knew we were going somewhere nice for dinner, so we got some spring rolls to tide us over.
Naam 1608
Next stop was dinner and this was a little way away (15-min drive), so Penny proposed that we grab a bike there where we both sat on the back of a motorbike. I was a little hesitant about this and offered a counter suggestion that was marginally safer – a tuk tuk ride.
Penny insisted that we have the massaman curry and we also got some stir fried vegetables and a prawn pad Thai. Rude not to really!
The food was delicious and we ate as much of it as we could before it got uncomfortable.
The restaurant also overlooks the river and often has a queue out of the door, so we were lucky to sneak in without a booking and shared a bench with two other solo diners.
Chinatown
After dinner, we decided to check out Bangkok’s Chinatown. Well, the main road anyway. It was a maze of lights and smells and traffic and bodies.
An attack on the sense and personal space later, and on the back of the success of our last tuk tuk trip, we grabbed another tuk tuk to our next stop. This took a bit of negotiation on price between us and the three tuk tuk drivers waiting to be hailed, but we got there in the end and settled on about 250THB for the 4km drive to ICONSIAM.
ICONSIAM
Just opposite the ICONSIAM shopping mall/small city, there is a parade of shops, many of which are massage parlours offering 1-hour massages for under £10. We had both had long days and both our backs were a bit sore, so went went into one and paid 700 THB for an hour each of a shoulders, back and neck massage. And my god, was it worth it. It wasn’t a Thai massage where they kind of beat you up and twist you out of whatever knots you were in, but it got pretty close at times. At least it felt like that.
On our way out of the massage parlour they gave us a cup of warm tea, which we sat down and drank while we gathered our thoughts. We both left feeling incredibly relaxed, if a little traumatised.
With unknotted muscles, we ventured back over the road to the ICONSIAM shopping mall.
If you thought Bluewater was big, think again. And also throw in all the luxury brands you can think of and put them under one roof, including Porsche, because why should cars be left out?!
Below the several floors of luxury and normal shops, there is a whole ‘floating’ market on the basement level, which was a far cry away from the one we’d experienced in the Green Lung area, but there were still countless unidentifiable foods being fried and sold. One fried ‘food’ happened to be an alligator… I think I’ll pass, thanks.
Rather than use a pine tree, they had opted for a tree made out of hats and another one upstairs was comprised of thousands of soft toys.
Some might argue that it’s a bit much, and they’d be correct, but it draws in loads of people, wealthy or not, and the sheer size of it means that it’s a good vantage point to look over the city from. So first, we had a look at the river from ground level and back up at the monster building.
to the esplanade area
Then we went upstairs and up the lift to check out the view from above…
After we’d walked around and weaved through tourists, we made the short 10-minute walk back to Penny’s flat where we had a video chat with Hannah from the sofa bed.
We bid her farewell and wished her a nice day ahead before heading to bed ourselves.
What a day! I don’t think we could’ve covered much more ground if we’d tried. Credit to Penny for being an excellent tour guide, making Bangkok navigable and even leaving me with some recommendations for the things we weren’t able to fit in one day.
Tomorrow is shaping up to be a busy one too! At least I know where I can get a decent massage if it’s all a bit much!
Blonde on a Road Trip 
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