I don’t know what I expected but other places we’ve visited in Asia – China, India, Japan – those visits did not prepare us for Bangkok.
Things I did expect and have experienced: heat and spicy food, friendly people. Something I experienced but did not expect: English everywhere, not just in signage for public transit but spoken by just about everyone that we’ve needed to communicate with. I’ve hardly even used my translation app since we arrived earlier this week.
We’re only here in Bangkok for a week. Part of that is because I was worried that the big city would have an uncomfortable amount of persistent folks hawking goods to tourists and beggars, but that hasn’t been the case at all. I also expected dense crowds which did not sound appealing at all with the high temps and humidity, but that really hasn’t been bad either. They even have reasonable sidewalks here making it easy to walk around.
The heat
We deliberately came in December, even though it’s peak tourist season, to increase the odds that we would have tolerable weather. And since we left freezing temps in the midwest to come here, it’s definitely a shock but today’s high is 89 degrees with 60% humidity. Really not too bad. Better if you can stay out of the sun.
The Food
Pad krapow (pan fried ground meat, usually pork or chicken, spiced with Thai chilis, soy sauce, fish sauce and sautéed with holy basil, served with steamed white rice and a fried egg on top) has been a favorite of mine since I first tried it in Toronto. I’d been looking forward to trying it in Thailand to see how it would compare to other places. I love it. I loved it, and i still love it.
We’ve also had pad thai which is also great, and another one that is high on my list of favorites. On a food tour we learned that the history of pad thai was that it was created and heavily promoted as a way of getting people to eat more noodles because turning rice into rice noodles requires less rice to feed people. There was a time when the country was struggling to have enough rice and this was a defence. Rice noodles and bamboo shoots were key.
History
There are a lot of Buddhist temples in Bangkok. The oldest around 250 years old. There are temples and shrines everywhere. Something like 400 temples in the city and no one knows how many shrines since most families have ones in their house.
The city that most of the world knows as Bangkok is known to locals as Krung Thep. Aka. “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit.”
The current location for the capital was established in 1782 when the king at the time decided that it was safer to have a river between their capital and Burma after their previous capital of Ayutthaya was invaded by the Burmese and fell almost 20 years earlier.
Today Bangkok is a thriving and modern city and a very easy place for westerners to visit and enjoy.
Teachers
Is it a scam? That’s probably a bit harsh but we did encounter something a little off. We did not encounter many panhandlers at all which was very nice. Also, we didn’t really encounter any hard sellers. Usually folks in tuktuk’s, cabs or scooters would try to get your attention to see if they could give you a ride, or an extended ride (aka a tour) but usually you could just say no thanks once or twice and that was the end of it.
On at least three occasions, when walking around minding our own business we encountered people who would just strike up a conversation saying something like, “I’m a teacher.” This would usually lead to them giving you some suggestions of where to go, what to see, where to shop. Sometimes there’s a map involved. One gentleman went so far as to draw a map and then hail a Tuktuk for us. Now it was kind of late in the day, and we’d been out and about for hours so I wasn’t thinking so clearly. He encountered us while we were taking a fairly long walk to a metro stop. His pitch was that one of the temples which usually charges a few hundred baht to enter was free today.
I was kind of interested in that but he was suggesting multiple stops and then a river ride which I wasn’t really in the mood for. Long story short, after the second temple when the tuktuk driver was following the “teachers” map, I just asked him to stop at the next intersection so that we could get out. We were too far from our hotel for him to bring us home, so we just paid him the agreed amount and ended up taking a taxi home.
Chrissy is convinced that the “teachers” are encouraged by the government to get tourists to do stuff. But, who knows. If it’s a scam, I’m still not really sure how the “teachers” profit from it.
Public transit
We’ve been in Bangkok for almost a week now and I’m starting to get the hang of how things work here. We’ve used ride share (Bolt), we’ve used the MRT (subway) and the BTS (sky train), we’ve used tuk tuks (3 wheeled, colorful, noisy, motorized taxi. The front is kind of like a motorcycle but the back is a covered, open air passenger area) and we’ve also used conventional metered taxies. What we’ve not done is a water taxi, nor have we hired a moped where you ride on the back! Seriously. Also, we never rode a conventional bus since they would be stuck in traffic, and many of them seemed old and not air-conditioned, so we just avoided them. I’d rather walk a bit and take the sky train or metro than be sitting in traffic on a hot bus.
Traffic in Bangkok is even worse than in Mexico City, which prior to this week was consistently some of the worst I’ve seen outside of India. India’s traffic has a way more chaos than Bangkok, but the car traffic here makes short trips take hours if you leave at the wrong time. But the solution here is just like in CDMX, take the train! Either the sky train or the metro will get you where you need to go without being impacted by slow traffic.
The train systems here are clean and very convenient. They’re pretty easy to use with google maps and a bit of patience. Unfortunately you often need to pay in cash using either an electronic kiosk or getting a token from a teller. That seemed to be the only way for the sky train, but for the metro, we were pleasantly surprised today to find that you could use a visa credit card, even a foreign one to tap yourself into and out of the stations. It was so much more convenient than having to stop and tell someone where you wanted to go and buy a one ride token.
So, Bangkok?
This stop in Bangkok was kind of a 6 day layover for us. I wanted to sample the city mostly to see if I liked it enough to want to spend more time later. We may do that at some point because there is tons to see and do here and we barely scratched the surface. What I will say for sure is that it’s been an almost universally positive experience and the things that I was worried about were either minor or nonexistent. The biggest negative to visiting here is the heat/humidity. But there’s not a lot you can do about that. If you’re thinking about visiting Bangkok, you absolutely should do it. It’s pretty great.
