Bangkok Day Two: Floating Market

This is about Arie's second day in Bangkok. You may want to start at day one.

Saturday, day trip day. We checked out of the hotel and got into a taxi we had hired for the day and headed for the floating market. Bangkok was once a city of primarily canals and ferries, and elements of that still remain--you can still take various boat rides in and around the city, and there's a traditional market on a canal an hour out of Bangkok where all the vendors are in boats. Of course, locals started driving to supermarkets decades ago, and so the boat rides and floating market are entirely crammed with tourists.

Our taxi driver took us to a long-tail boat dock. I was pretty sick of long-tail boats after my trip to Krabi, but we didn't seem to have much choice. They were supposed to be 500 baht ($14.25) each, but we were ready to walk away at that price (we weren't that desperate to see yet another market), so they let us have it for 400 ($11.50)--we still weren't thrilled, but we had come a long way. We climbed into the boat and our driver immediately set out at a fairly high speed through the narrow canals. Just as I was telling myself that he had a lot of experience and we were perfectly safe, he slammed us at high speed into a wall. Only minor injuries.

The floating market itself is a few hundred feet of canal space that's absolutely crammed with long-tail boats and rowboats of tourists, and of course dugouts filled with souvenirs. There are also some floating food vendors. No engines are permitted in the market itself, and so the boat coasts in and the pilot rows the boat through the mass. It's so crowded that mostly you sit and wait for space to open up in front of you. The vendors have hooks; the more aggressive ones will hook your boat and pull it over so you can get a closer look at the Floating Market T-Shirts or whatever, while the less aggressive will only hook your boat if you express some interest.

It's interesting to see, but it's so intensely touristy that it's hard to stand for long. Once we were through, we asked our boat driver to take us back to our taxi. Instead, he piloted us over to a dock that didn't look familiar, and a friendly guy invited us to take a tour of a coconut sugar processing plant. He assured us that it was very interesting, that it would only take a few minutes, and then we could go home. Fortunately, we are familiar with tourist traps and had been expecting this, and adamantly refused to get out of the boat. Eventually they realized that we weren't going for it, and our driver took us instead to a large canal where guys tried to sell us fish food. Didn't go for that either. Next stop: our dock.

The floating market was probably a fascinating and beautiful place once, maybe twenty or thirty years ago, but now it's so crowded with tourists that it's just kind of sad. I guess most interesting things can expand to accommodate visitors, but not the floating market, and so it just gets more and more unpleasant. I had a lot of fun, but mainly because I found the whole thing hilarious--once I saw the vendors on boats selling floating market t-shirts, I knew I was going to enjoy it.

Nonetheless, we were eager to get the hell out of there. I urge you to read about the next part of my trip, where I pet some tigers.