One of the great attractions about Thailand in general is the incredible open air markets that are all over the place. The Thai people, in general, think nothing of setting up a shingle on a sidewalk and selling something. When they get organized and clump together or somebody throws money at the problem, the markets are nothing short of amazing to walk through.
Here’s a selection of the fruit that are available:
I tried most of the fruits and they were incredibly good. It was extremely easy to eat healthy in Bangkok because fruit was readily available and cheap.
The same could be said for spices and anything else you can think of including flowers.
The flower market is one of the attractions written up frequently in the guide books. Based on the other markets that we had been to, I assumed it was some type of building where all the flowers sellers worked. To get their, we decided to take transit which involved the Skytrain, Subway and then taking a ferry to correct stop along the river.
We were pros with the Skytrain and the Subway and managed to get to the main ferry dock in one piece. After that it got a bit dodgy. It was impossible to tell which stop to get off at and it wasn’t clear what the cost was either. After several stressful minutes of arguing with each other, we joined a line and boarded a ferry but we still were not clear on where we needed to get off.
They collected fares on the boat for the princely sum of about 30c each. Sharon had been thinking ahead and pulled out a piece of paper with the words flower market written in Thai and showed it to ticket collector. She told us what number stop to get off.
It was fun crusing up the river but the river was busy, brown and had visible pollution on it. Here are a few of the shots, click on the gallery link for all of them:
Long tailed boats, made popular in several James Bond movies are loud and come in all shapes and sizes. The engines are basically a car engine with a propeller attached directly to the transmission. They also take out all the muffling which makes them deafening to say the least. I suspect all the drivers are at least partially deaf or worse.
When we got off the ferry, there was a man waiting on the dock, who was, of course, a cab driver and wanted to drive us to our destination. We didn’t want to take a cab. We asked him which way to walk so we set off with a bad street map (no such thing as a good street map in Thailand). After about 15 minutes of walking in the middle of the day, we were lost. We approached several Thai people walking along the road and finally came across an older gentleman who spoke passable English and told us to come back the way we came. You wonder why I don’t like cab drivers in Bangkok.
When we finally made it to the flower market, we found it was simply vendors along several streets selling everything from cut flowers to garlands or simply bags of petals.
All in all, it was a great days outing and highly recommended. Apparently the flower markets are best around 4:00 AM. Do let us know what its like.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
You must log in to post a comment.