A reunion and a romp through Bangkok

If you are on a long-term, open-ended traveling experience, you get very pleasantly used to the inevitability of your trip’s rhythm. The memories of a boring life at “home” or working at some company you don’t care about get smaller and smaller.

And you just look forward to exploring as much as you can. It’s addictive, and absolutely healthy for your soul.

On Day 169 of this trip, having spent a month apart, Masayo and I were reunited in Bangkok. (While I was goofing off in Surin, Thailand, she had gone back to visit family in Japan.)

Although we passed through Bangkok without stopping a few weeks ago, this time we decided to stay and find out what it was all about.

If you wander around aimlessly in a town, your experiences may resemble ours in Bangkok. Read on for our series of mini-adventures!

Debs’ place

Masayo’s friend Debs, who was teaching English in Bangkok, was nice enough to let us use an extra room in her apartment for a couple days. Debs’ digs were top-notch, very new and very clean with all the amenities. The building even had its own giant swimming pool we could use! I was impressed. My English companies never gave me a place like this in Japan.

We eventually moved to a guesthouse in Lumphini though, which had free breakfast consisting of coffee, bread and butter. Masayo and I met a lone Japanese traveler named Atsushi, who was living as cheaply as possible: each morning he’d eat like 10 slices of toast, presumably skipping lunch. Backpackers are a creative, hardy lot.

Teeny local market

One day we strolled around and ended up on an obscure little back alley; I don’t know what pulled us here but it didn’t seem particularly inviting or touristy. When we got to the end, we found it opened onto a dirt field containing a little local market.

A few vendors sold food and other things, so we got some noodles and sat down with everyone else. They accepted us, of course, as Thai people always do. The vendors gave us bowls of noodles and we added to them from the buffet-style bowls of ingredients: bean sprouts, leafy vegetables, et cetera.

It was a great way to spend the afternoon, eating tasty and super-cheap food with a bunch of unassuming locals.

Bangkok by river boat, and the soles of your shoes

Our biggest excursion in Bangkok was a ride up the Chaophraya River that winds through the city, and then a long, hot walk back to the center.

Our mostly random boat ride went from Sathorn Pier (สาทร) to Tha Tien Pier (ท่าเตียน), a quick jaunt up the lively and very muddy river. The spires of Wat Arun (“Temple of Dawn”) rose on the opposite bank; it’s always cool to be in a busy modern city that keeps large sections of land reserved for ancient and spiritual buildings. It shows a culture that has its heart in the right place.

Walking past Wat Pho and down into the heart of Bangkok, it was tough to overcome the stifling heat of the sunny afternoon. Near Wat Ratchaburana we found a coffee shop and stopped to rest, but there is no escaping the heat of Bangkok.

After making it through industrious-looking Chinatown with its little shops and specialty outlets we took the subway back to Lumphini and whiled away the day at a local organic coffee shop.

Relaxing and working

The next few days were spent doing very little. We hung around the room, getting wifi from one of the networks when we could (our guesthouse didn’t have it, but you can often glom onto a free one in densely populated areas like Bangkok) and doing some online work.

 

We then had a big move to make: leaving Thailand, which we had loved and called home for three months, and head to a new country: Day 180 and into Laos.

If you’ve visited Bangkok, let me know what I missed during this stay. I saw what I saw, and I’m sure you have your own highlights. I shared mine; please share yours 🙂

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