Bangkok Canal Cruise; Flower Market

Bangkok has canals. Who knew? Probably a lot of people, but not me before I started planning this trip. I saw portions of a couple of those canals on a two-hour canal cruise. After that, I took a look at Bangkok’s flower market, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Canal Cruise

The canal cruise was on a long, wooden boat (long relative to its width, which whas not very wide) with six or seven wooden benches wide enough for a couple of people to sit comfortably on each.

The canal cruise had a guide who sat at the front of the boat and a driver at the back. The boat’s engine was inside the boat, but the propeller was at the end of a long shaft that hung off the back of the boat and could be levered out of the water. Don’t ask me why.

The guide worked for the company that operated the canal cruise. I know, because she wore a shirt emblazoned with the company’s name. But I think the company just rents the boats as needed. There were a lot of similar boats plying the Bangkok canals we were on and they didn’t seem to be running the same tours.

The guide’s name was Pear. I might have the spellling wrong, but its probably an English transliteration of her Thai name, so it would be an artificial spelling anyway. But I’m going to go with “Pear” becasue, to make sure we heard her properly when a couple of customers asked her to repeat it, she said, “you know, like the fruit.”

Pear said that that is not her full legal name, but rather her nickname. She said that the monks name buddhist children and they assign them very long names. Pear told us what hers was. She could barely say it with just one breath. She said that Thai parents then assign their babies nicknames, which are what usually get used.

Pear also said that “Bangkok” is just a short form of the city’s name. According to her, the full name is listed in the Guiness Book of Records as the longest city name in the world. She told us what it is. She couldn’t fit it into a single breath.

The canal cruise route wasn’t quite the one they usually run. Typically, they run it on a couple of connected canals that joins on either end with the Chao Phraya River. The usual cruise begins near the river on one of the canals. And we did start at the usual point. But then it normally ends at a different dock, one on the river.

But there was some flooding in Thailand’s north, which is the source of the river. As a result, the river was higher than usual. There are locks at the points where the canals intersect with the river. When the river is high, they close the locks to protect the canal neighbourhoods from flooding.

Pear said they ran the normal cruise yesterday and she had to wait for more than an hour to get through the locks. So they altered the cruise today.

The canal cruise has two stops on the canals where the guide and passengers get out and explore the sights a bit. Today, rather than going out to the river, we went to the second stop and then the boat turned around and went back the way we came and ended at the starting point.

On the Canals

I read somewhere that Bangkok has been called Venice of the East. Pear repeated that today. I’ve been to Venice a few times. Sorry, Bangkok, you’re no Venice. The couple of canals the cruise took me on were narrower than Venice’s Grand Canal, but wider than most of Venice’s interior canals.

The canals the cruise went along have houses along most of their banks, along with a few temples. There were also some schools. Pear explained that the temples have schools associated with them and the government subsidizes them.

The houses along the canal varied. A few were rather ramshackled and falling apart. Pear said some have collapsed and more probably will soon. But there are also some modern homes that look rather expensive. And there were a few apartment buildings of six or so storeys.

According to Pear, at one time, the canals used to be the primary mode of transportation in that section of Bangkok. Back then, there were floating markets in the canals. People would come in their boats and buy from merhants selling from their boats. But then cars became popular and the floating markets disappeared. The goverment is trying to revive them for tourism. There is still one, but now customer buy from on the docks, not while on boats.

Stops on the Canal Cruise

As I said, the canal cruise made two stops. The first was at a dock that’s part of a long boardwalk tht cantilevers over the canal. On the inland side of the boardwalk are a bunch of mostly small shops selling, a lot of, but not entirely souvenirs. We got out and walked along the boardwalk and the boat picked us up at the other end of it.

The shops along the boardwalk are considered to be part of people’s homes, and I think there are some residences in the floor above. In Thailand, it’s the custom to remove your shoes in people’s homes. So before you go into most of the shops you have to take off your shoes.

At one point shortly after getting off the boat, Pear stopped and pulled out a clear plastic bag filled with what looked like very fat Cheetos, but of different colours. The ones Pear had were red and yellow.

She said they’re fishfood. In the water, I could see the occasional fish near the surface of the water. When Pear threw in a handful of the fishfood a very large swarm of fish frothed at the surface and consumed the floating fishfood.

I know the collective noun for fish is usually school, not swarm, but “school” doesn’t do justice to the way these fish behaved.

She then let each of us reach into the bag, grab some of the fishfood and throw it into the canal. The frenzy returned with each throw.

Pear said that they’re catfish. She also said that some people fish them, but not near the temples and their monks. One of the tenets of Buddhism is you can’t kill animals. So, no fishing. But she said people do it away from the temples.

As we walked along the boardwalk, I saw that many of the shops sold the same type of fishfood, in a wider variety of colours.

Pear stopped us in front of one larger shop. It was a coffee shop, that also sold souvenirs. However, neither of those were its main activity. it operated as an art studio. Several people were sitting on cushions on the floor fashioning necklaces and bracelets from beads available from the shop. A couple of other people were painting.

Pearl suggested we take off our shoes and go inside because there’s a black and white photograph of what the canal looked like a hundred years ago. I went inside.

When I left, I noticed hand-painted signs on a couple of the doors saying, “Thank you for visiting us. May you have a good life.”

No, thank you.

The second stop on the canal cruise was at the Big Buddha. It’s the largest Buddha in Bangkok and the third-largest in Thailand. (Not to be confused with the largest pure gold Buddha, which I saw yesterday.) Except we didn’t see the Big Buddha. What we saw was the big green-cloth shrouded scaffolding. The Big Buddha is being restored underneath that scaffoling.

According to Pear, the Big Buddha is made mostly of copper, but it has some gold on its head. Plus, the Big Buddha is hollow, except that it has a heart of gold. Literally.

While we couldn’t see the Big Buddha, there’s a five-storey museum right next door to it. Pear toured us around inside. We started on the ground floor, where furniture, a car, and other items donated to the temple are on display.

We then took an elevator to the top floor. Up there, they created on the ceiling their interpretation of heaven, beneath which is a tall green cone that ascends from the underwater world created on the floor.

There’s also a patio on the top level with a good view of the shrouded scaffolding, but also of the city.

From there, we worked our way down floor by floor, which have displays of Bhuddist relics and other artifacts.

After the museum, we walked back to the dock, where the boat picked us up and returned us to the starting point to end the canal cruise.

On the canal cruise, Pear suggested one of the things we could, on our own, do after it is visit Bangkok’s flower market. The restaurant where they started and ended the canal cruise runs a free shuttle to the nearest MRT. And the flower market is just one MRT stop away from there.

Bangkok Flower Market

Before deciding to go to the flower market, when we were off the boat, I asked Pear if the market was still open—the canal cruise didn’t end until a little after 4:00 pm. She replied, “Oh, yes. It’s open 24×7.”

So, if you find yourself in Bangkok with insomnia and you have a flower emergency at 2:00 in the morning, you know where to go.

The flower market wasn’t what I expected. It’s in a large, dimmly lit warehouse of a building, with a mostly open front and back.

The stalls did mostly have flowers, but they were almost all of the same nature in almost all of the stalls. Just blooms of the same breed and colour of flower, almost all an orangey yellow, and little to no stems were mostly sitting in large quantities bunched together in bags. In few of the stalls, rather than being balled up in plastic bags, they were fashioned into rings that looked too small to be necklaces and two big to be bracelets. I don’t know what their end purpose is.

A few stalls did have some different coloured flowers on stems, but only a very few. There were also a couple of stalls that sold fruits and vegetables mixed in among the flower stalls.

Very weird. And not particularly attractive. But it was an experience. So, there’s that.

So ends another day in Bangkok. I still have a couple more days here left. I bet you can’t wait to see what I get up to. Right? I said, RIGHT?!