The tour hasn't officially started yet. We arrived a day early because of flight scheduling issues from Seattle. So today was a day all to ourselves. People who do group tours usually call this a free day. It's almost like taking a vacation while you are retired! Why call it a free day when every day is a free day while on vacation? Or is it free because we are not hobnobbing with fellow tourists? In any case that is the official term and I am sticking to it.
We are going to doing regularly scheduled city tours and such tomorrow. So we decided to do something exotic and/or geeky that no normal tourist would venture to do. I did much research to figure out the most obscure thing possible that would take a large amount of effort. I eventually came up with a visit to the Royal Barge Museum. This we thought was exotic because what red-blooded tourist would go visit something so obscure instead of going and mingling with diverse (tongue-in-cheek now) China Town and little India? It was geeky because Sandhya and I love sailing and boats and know a thing or two about them. We were eager to see how they compared with the Catalinas that we used to sail.
This was a good choice because the combination of wrong instructions on the Bangkok.com website, unrelenting sun, suffocating humidity and other factors, it became a very interesting jaunt.
While figuring out all this stuff, we discovered that Bangkok has a great transportation system for tourists that uses their main river, Chao Praya with connections to an on-land transit system. Super. For just 150 Baht per person, we could go up and down the river, getting on and off as many times as we wanted to. The ticket is good for the day.
We stayed at the Ramada on the River. They provide free shuttles to the terminus of the all-day boat service called Chao Praya Tourist Boat (this may change by the time you read this, readers, so please check before you use this information). So off we went to the terminus and took the all-day boat.
On our way to Sathorn -- the starting point for the Chao Praya Tourist Boat
We finally walked around 3 Km, for about 2 hours, climbed and descend two bridges, traversed a military compound and got to the Royal Barge Museum. The lady at the counter at museum was intent in teaching me how to say thank you and keep correcting my accent till I got it right!
We are going to doing regularly scheduled city tours and such tomorrow. So we decided to do something exotic and/or geeky that no normal tourist would venture to do. I did much research to figure out the most obscure thing possible that would take a large amount of effort. I eventually came up with a visit to the Royal Barge Museum. This we thought was exotic because what red-blooded tourist would go visit something so obscure instead of going and mingling with diverse (tongue-in-cheek now) China Town and little India? It was geeky because Sandhya and I love sailing and boats and know a thing or two about them. We were eager to see how they compared with the Catalinas that we used to sail.
This was a good choice because the combination of wrong instructions on the Bangkok.com website, unrelenting sun, suffocating humidity and other factors, it became a very interesting jaunt.
While figuring out all this stuff, we discovered that Bangkok has a great transportation system for tourists that uses their main river, Chao Praya with connections to an on-land transit system. Super. For just 150 Baht per person, we could go up and down the river, getting on and off as many times as we wanted to. The ticket is good for the day.
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| Chao Praya river viewed from our Hotel |
We stayed at the Ramada on the River. They provide free shuttles to the terminus of the all-day boat service called Chao Praya Tourist Boat (this may change by the time you read this, readers, so please check before you use this information). So off we went to the terminus and took the all-day boat.
On our way to Sathorn -- the starting point for the Chao Praya Tourist Boat
Getting to Sathorn, boarding the Tourist Boat were all completely uneventful. It was the standard fare. Hoards of tourists, many of them still smelling fresh (the day was young yet). But the cacophony was unbelievable. People was yelling and chatting very loudly. We have so long away from Asia (India) that we have forgotten how noisy it can be. And then we had the ticket collector, a woman, who was running around yelling at people and when they didn't listen she would clap with her hands very loudly till she got their attention. Turns out she just wanted to check for tickets. The reason she had to clap was that she was speaking Thai and the rest spoke only Chinese, Norwegian, Dutch, German etc (not many American accents, though). Clapping, of course, is a universal attention getter.
To get back to our 'exploration', the guide book said pier N10 was where we should get off. Instead that Tourist Boat dropped us of at pier 11. Everyone knows I am a stickler for following instructions and we off walking towards pier N10. The plan was to then get to the Royal Barge museum. After all, my thoughts were, if the government produced a booklet with instructions, it would be best to follow them. Of course, Sandhya had no reason to distrust my beliefs and we set off towards N10.
Sandhya then came up with this great idea of using mapquest (she is a fan). She plugged in the Royal Barge Museum. The instructions said to go one way and I thought we should go the other way.
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| On our way to the Royal Barge Museum |
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In any case, we had an obscure goal and a determination to succeed in getting to the goal! And we did. See these pictures above to see the beautiful barges. The barges are very impressive. It doesn't seem easy to carry out a battle in these boats, but then I am not a Navy man, so I am not going to opine!
Had a great day though! Let's see what tomorrow brings forth.
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