Wandering in Bangkok

I had 3 free days in Bangkok and on 2 of them I wandered around areas near-ish my hotel, looking and absorbing and sitting and watching and taking photos.  On the 1st day I took a taxi to the museum and then meandered back and on the other day I meandered out from the hotel and caught a taxi back again. 

Taxis are safe, reliable, easy to flag down and brightly coloured as you see here.  They were cheap to us (about £1.50 each trip) but that is expensive compared to the public transport that local use.  The fabulous skytrain (like the subway on stilts) is fast and frequent and costs about 10p for a short trip.  The ferries that cross the river are 3p per journey going up to 20p to travel several stops along the river.  Despite all the great public transport the roads are busy at during rush hour hardly move.  Motobikes are clearly popular and seem to cover the pavements, and some drivers even drive their bikes on the pavement to get past the static traffic – rather hairy for pedestrians.

The river and smaller canals (klongs) criss cross the city and I used them to navigate a lot – walk til bump into the water etc.  There are some really impressive multi lane bridges over the river and people cross it on the ferries.  The klongs have plenty of footpath bridges too

That tall tower on the bridge was massive upclose and one of many signs that height is deemed impressive with most of the wats and important buildings having towers with metal points on top to increase their height

I passed plenty of intriguing doorways that looked to lead to courtyards and gates or grilles hiding interiors.  The padlock int he photo is the grille in front of one of the collections in the museum – not very pretty but I guess its effective

and I was delighted to happen upon this scene – yes the kids are cute but what really pleased me was the label above the door in English meaning I could satisfy my library loving friends.  This is a primary school attached to a wat – all school education in Thailand is free and schools are attached to temples or churches or are state run.

With all of my walking about in the heat I was pleased to discover plenty of benches in parks and in shopping malls and beside the klongs

and plenty of locals relaxing in shady spots and around the table set up near the food stalls (I’ll share images of them tomorrow)