17.01 Day 2 Bangkok
Day 2 - Wed 17th Jan - Bangkok
After a mere 14 hours sleep I awake feeling fully better. By 7am we’re all awake and consider plans for the day. First task is for me to nip downstairs and forage for breakfast. It's warm already, 28 degrees, and the street food carts are out cutting and cooking and frying. The nearby market I do a loop through and it has all its foods out on display including all the raw components of chickens in heaped piles in metal trays, which conflicts with our usual expectations of sanitation and refrigeration - but then later that day i see the same set up in a supermarket under an office building in the city, so it's not just a function of it being a local’s market. As the only electrical equipment in our room is an aircon unit and a fridge, cooking meat wasn’t on the agenda anyway. I opt for some watermelon and mango, peeled and chopped for me, complemented with 2 bbq pork buns and 4 flat pork skewers and sticky rice (145 baht, $7). All are a hit back in the room with requests for the same again tomorrow.
Bags loaded up with water and snacks we head back to Thewet ferry wharf - same animals for sale, but now many more passengers milling around waiting to go to work and school. Our ferry, a long narrow boat, arrives almost straight away and, with a degree of casualness Sydney Harbour Ferries would be disappointed with, people hop off and we hop on.
Underway, heading South, the ticket lady collects our 64 Baht ($3). The Chao Phraya river running through Bangkok is fast moving and littered with boats of varying sizes from smaller long tail boats to dark, black flat bed barges, all belching out smoke (though the overall air quality isn’t as bad as it has appeared in the news from time to time). The 200m wide waterway contains many small floating islands of broken branches and leaves some with a small stork atop aboard for the ride.
We pass the spectacularly intricate Wat Arun temple on the opposite river bank but disembark after 20 minutes just after the Grand Palace to seek out Wat Pho, a temple home to the reclining Buddha. On the 10 minute walk to the temple we are only accosted once by a local telling us the Grand Palace is closed today for a National holiday and is about to offer us his own alternative tour before we cut him short. Unfortunately for him we aren’t going there anyway and also, this was word for word the scam mentioned in guidebooks/blogs. Though as we leave him behind, I am left wondering, what does happen on days when it is genuinely a national holiday, how does his act differ?
At the entrance Kate and Sienna don longer clothing to cover their knees, meanwhile men can stay in shorts so Seb doesn’t have to change out of his complete Balmain Tigers football kit. I was expecting just a single building housing the famous Buddha but it's actually a symmetrical compound, which causes the kids to several times insist we’ve already been here as we walk through new sections. In answer to the question as to how many temples is too many for a 9 or 6 year old child, in the case of Seb it's about one half. Though his hunger may have played a part in that.
There are dozens of ornate Buddhas, most adorned in gold paint sat atop sparkling gem stone lined stone settings. Immaculately pruned trees and hedges are interspersed with stone lions and large stone guards either side of doorways and the brightly coloured roofs with the common combination of red, green and yellow roofs stand out against the blue sky above.
After ringing a large, but quieter than expected gong (after watching a tour guide show someone else to ensure we weren’t commiting a huge faux pas) we remove our shoes to see the centrepiece, ironically in the back corner, not the centre, an almost 50 metre long gold reclining Buddha housed in a temple it only just fits in, all built over 200 years ago. The posture of the Buddha symbolises the calm contemplative Buddha just before he passes into the afterlife. You enter by the head, walk the length of the body, around the 5 metre long and then out behind the back.
Here, for 20 baht the kids each get a small tin of coins to place one coin in each of the 108 bronze bowls to enable them to place a wish. Sienna admits afterwards uncertainty with what to do with the excess coins and why didn’t they give her exactly the right number as they know how many bowls there are.
Out the front we order our first Grab (Thai Uber) and ride 30 minutes to the Snake Farm. It's a far more organised and professional set up than the name suggests, as part of the Red Cross, set behind their building and circular lake off a busy main road.
There is an outdoor area with snakes on display but we make a beeline for indoors, a 2 storey (over?) air conditioned building with a large collection of mostly sleepy snakes downstairs except for one of the cobras that flares up behind the glass. As part of the Red Cross this venture was set up as a centrepoint for venom (and so anti-venom) collection for the numerous venomous snakes in Thailand. WIth over 250 species of snake of which 80 are poisonous you can understand its need. Upstairs there are (dead) snakes held up in tall cylindrical glass tubes and several complete skeleton sets of snakes up to 4 metres long. Plus, and to the kids entertainment, several screens with Thai or English buttons for commentary on life cycles of a snake or dealing with bites.
Stomachs are now rumbling so we walk out to a food court just along the street under an office block and wolf down various permutations of pork and rice.
Back to the Snake Farm for a 2pm Handlers show in the small outdoor covered auditorium where one by one, a selection of snakes are brought out and placed on the ground or held by the handler to a series of Ohs and Ahs of the 50 strong crowd as the snakes hiss and flare at their handlers. At the conclusion, when there is a chance to hold a Boa Constrictor, Sienna races to be second in the queue taking Kate with her, displaying a beaming smile as this long thick snake is draped on her shoulders. Seb is unusually restrained so I go with Sienna a second time.
After the success of using Grab, we order another to take us back to Sawardee Guesthouse (The Original) for some down time and freshening up. Around 6pm we walk out and find a cafe selling small bowls of pork or beef with any choice of noodles (20 baht, $1 each). On the way home we stop for a smoothie and tea at the cafe under the hostel next to ours, which Sienna instantly prefers to our inhouse cafe as it has a small pond and waterfall containing three turtles and a fish, along with a selection of kids games on a shelf too. An unfinished game of chess is left behind as we collapse into bed around 9pm.