04-05 January
We had left Heathrow on 2nd January, arriving in Bangkok in the afternoon of the 3rd
– our first full day in Thailand would therefore be the 4th which just so happened to be Mrs ABS’s 60th birthday (and now you know why we chose January …)
We planned a day out.
However, first things first: Breakfast.
Having arrived at the hotel restaurant, I decided that ‘when in Rome’ wouldn’t apply to breakfast as I wasn’t too keen on noodles and fried rice at that time of the morning. I therefore settled for a sort of ‘full English’– that is; there were eggs, some sort of hot dog style chicken sausage (chicken! What had I let myself in for?), baked beans, tomato and a clump of several rashers of streaky bacon.
Cold streaky bacon.
I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture – the many bacon lovers here would just get upset.
With breakfast over, we noted that opposite the hotel was a tourist car hire place, so we booked out a car and driver for the day for 2000 Baht (about £50) and within 20 minutes, we were on our way to do the tourist bit.
First stop:
The Damnoen Saduak Floating Market.
ตลาดน้ำดำเนินสะดวก
Yes, this is the same floating market in which Roger Moore filmed the boat chase scene in the 1974 James Bond film, ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’
Entry, as there was just the two of us in a 6-man boat, was 4000 Baht (there was also a 5000B option..) Ouch!
But it was the wife’s birthday, and I wanted to get in touch with my inner James Bond, so we smiled through gritted teeth and coughed up 4000B (we tried to haggle, but the price was not going to be moved).
A shared boat would have been cheaper but we were the last in the line at that moment.
We spent just nearly two hours there during which time the boat would trickle around the canals and if we saw a stall we liked the look of, our guide would bring the boat to the side and we’d do our bargaining. There were sellers shouting their wares from store fronts lining the one bank, or in one or two cases waving monkeys or great big yellow snakes at us for photo opportunities (we didn’t). Boats slowly chugged past us offering opportunities to buy rather spicy smelling food, cooked fresh on the boat, or if you fancied it: coconut ice cream (loads of that).
It was a wonderfully noisy experience with some of the smells coming the boats offering hot food were [mostly] mouth-watering.
It was an odd but also a rather novel experience to flag down a passing boat selling fruit and buy a bag of mango slices.
I had hoped that 4000 Baht entry fee would include the opportunity to immerse oneself in the full ‘James Bond Experience’ and throw an irritating child trying to flog a wooden elephant overboard.
But alas, no.
Maybe that’s in the 5000 Baht entry price..
Clutching our purchases and the bag of already rapidly softening mango slices we then made our way to our next stop.
The Maeklong Railway Market ตลาดรถไฟแม่กลอง
This is the [world famous] market that straddles a railway on which several times a day a train passes through forcing all the vendors to pack away their canopies that overhang the track.
As the time approached, the crowds swelled and collected on the sides and a uniformed man waving a megaphone walked along the line ‘Train coming soon! Train coming soon! Get ready!’ while the store owners tidied away their canopies, chairs and tables.
The clearing away of the canopies is described on ‘tourismthailand.org’ as ‘chaotic’; in reality it is, as one would expect, quite a well-practised and polished process.
The same website blurb describes the train as ‘coming at great speed’.
It doesn’t.
But while it may be a slow approach, there’s not a lot of room..
The train took around 5 minutes to pass through and after the excitement, we moved on and our driver, who was really chatty and very informative, took us to a nearby Salt Lake.
This is a sort of working farm/museum and it actually turned out to be rather interesting in a salty sort of way.
Rather amusingly (to me, at least!), it even uses the services of what they call a ‘smart snake’
At our request we also stopped at a couple of temples throughout the day – Mrs ABS had read that visiting a temple on your birthday would bring good fortune, more so on a 60th which she understood is seen in Thailand as a special birthday.
There were plenty of temples to choose from but, maybe because it was a Saturday, they were either closed or just empty. I guess Buddha has Saturday off to watch the footy or something.
Even though some of the temples were closed, there were a few we were able to go into the compounds and look around – the buildings were all very ornate and colourful – and there was one where previous visitors had left gifts in the form of, somewhat bizarrely, opened bottles of water or pop.
The ‘When in Rome’ syndrome kicked in and Mrs ABS decided to do likewise.
With our day out concluded, it was back to our hotel where we arrived at about 5pm. We hadn’t been back long when Mrs ABS answered a knock on the door, and was handed a birthday present from the hotel.
It was a rather nice piece of chocolate cake – so it didn’t survive for long!
Cake consumed and with time rolling on, we needed to sort out restaurant for a 60th birthday meal.
For weeks Mrs ABS had fancied eating at a roof-top restaurant, and who wouldn’t?
‘A roof-top Thai restaurant in Bangkok for my 60th birthday? Oooh, lovely!’
The nearest such restaurant to us however was a Belgian one.
We didn’t fancy waffles, however well they would be presented.
There was a well recommended Indian restaurant but, as Mrs ABS had her mind set on a Thai one, she was a bit reluctant.
“All this way to Thailand for an Indian meal?”
Fair point.
However, two further restaurants that we looked at were fully booked and so we came around to the idea of the Indian. Then Mrs ABS realised the restaurant was on the 142nd floor and had a bit of a wobbly:
“That’s too high!”
“Darling, it’ll be fine. It’s not really that high and the view will be amazing. Imagine it; Bangkok at night all lit up, you’d see for miles and…”
“No!”
“I’m sure there’ll be oxygen masks and parachutes available”
“*£@#&*%*!! NO!”
In the end, we booked a rather nice (hotel recommended) ground floor restaurant a couple of streets away and took a tuk-tuk.
Ate well.
Drank well
No vertigo.
A nice chilled out way to finish an amazing day out and with a birthday Mrs ABS will long remember.
The next day, after another noodle and rice free breakfast, we checked out of the Rembrandt for our flight to Sakon Nakhon and a long overdue family reunion.
© Afghanistan Banana Stand 2025
