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 was 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 sitting at the boat’s front and a driver at the back. The boat’s engine was inside, 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 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 spelling wrong, but it’s probably an English transliteration of her Thai name, so it would be an artificial spelling anyway. But I’m going to go with “Pear” because, 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 Thai parents then assign their babies nicknames, which are what usually get used.

Pear also said that “Bangkok” is a short form of the city’s name. According to her, the full name is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest city name in the world. She told us what it is and 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 join 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.

However, 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.

And the architecture, while certainly not ugly, doesn’t compare to Venice’s architecture, which is beautiful and both historic and historical.

The canals the cruise went along have houses along most of their banks and 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. People would come in their boats and buy from merchants selling from their boats. But then cars became popular, and the floating markets disappeared. The government is trying to revive them for tourism. There is still one, but now customers 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 that 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.

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

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 fish food. In the water, I could see the occasional fish near the surface. When Pear threw in a handful of the fish food, a very large swarm of fish frothed at the surface and consumed the floating fish food.

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

She then let each of us reach into the bag, grab some of the fish food, 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 for them, but not near the temples and their monks. One of the tenets of Buddhism is that 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 fish food, in a wider variety of colours.

Pear stopped us in front of a larger shop. It was a coffee shop that also sold souvenirs. However, neither of those was 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 remove 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 scaffolding.

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 their interpretation of heaven on the ceiling, 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 had displays of Buddhist 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 do on our own after the tour: 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 p.m. 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 two o’clock in the morning, you know where to go.

The flower market wasn’t what I expected. It’s in a large, dimly 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 a 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 too big to be bracelets. I don’t know what their end purpose is.

A few stalls had 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 left here. I bet you can’t wait to see what I get up to. Right? I said, RIGHT?!