Bangkok Walking Food Tour

This morning, I told you that I intentionally skipped lunch for a reason that would become apparent when I posted this entry. If you bothered to read the title of this post, Bangkok Walking Food Tour, you no doubt surmised the reason. I booked a walking tour for this afternoon. The tour was focused on food. A lot of it.

The tour didn’t start until 2:00, which is past my normal lunchtime, but I wanted to make room for the food on the tour.

But, wait. There’s more. Early tomorrow afternoon I have to catch a flight to my next destination on this trip. Traffic in Bangkok can be fierce so I’ll probably leave the hotel mid-morning and lounge around the hotel until then. Consequently, this will be my last journal entry on Bangkok for this trip. Recognizing that, I’ll write a Bangkok summary at the end of this entry.

But first, the walking food tour.

Walking Food Tour

The food tour starting point was at the exit from an MRT station. When I arrived, there were three people standing there, an older Caucasian man (probably not as old as I am, but not young) and two younger Asian women (not really young, but definitely not old).

None of them looked like tourguides, so I visually scoured the area for someone who looked like one. Seeing me do that, the man asked me if I’m going on the food tour.

“Yes, I am,” I responded.

“So, are we,” he replied.

He asked me where I’m from. “Canada,” was my answer.

As an automatic reflex, I asked him where he was from.

“The United States, Boston.”

I told him that I have friends in Boston and that I’d be there in a few weeks. Then, because my friends (you know who you are) are in Brookline, which feels like Boston to me but is technically a different municipality, and because I’m a stickler for such things, I narrowed it down to Brookline for him. To which he responded, “Oh, I live in Brookline.” I don’t know where in Brookline.

It’s a small world after all.

I’ll call him Josh for a reason that won’t be apparent unless I tell you that he told me his name is Josh.

The two women are currently living in Bangkok and are originally from Myanmar, where there’s a war going on. (I was told their names, but I didn’t quite catch them because the names didn’t ring clearly to my anglophone ears.) One of them has a charitable organization that provides legal aid in a number of not-particulalry-rich countries. Josh is a public defender who is volunteering for her organization. So they were together on the tour. The other woman works at a university.

But never mind that. This is about the food tour.

A couple of minutes later, the tourguide, Jan, arrived. And we started the tour.

She took us by a couple of sites I’d already seen. She stopped in front of, but didn’t go into, Wat Traimit and told us about the Golden Buddha inside. She also took us to the colourful Kuan Yim Shrine, that I’d also been to on the same day as Wat Traimit.

At Kuan Yim Shrine, Jan told us about some simple fortune telling that goes on there and in some other shrines. She asked us if we wanted to try it. Josh and I did. The way it works is, you pick up a red cylinder filled with thin sticks. Each stick has number rapped around it.

You shake the cylinder back and forth until one of the sticks lifts up and falls out of the cylinder. You then get your fortune based on the number. Jan said they used to have copies of the fortunes for each number printed on pieces of paper. If people got a good fortune, they’d put the piece of paper in their wallet for good luck. If they got a bad fortune they’d burn it right there to try to rid themselves of the bad luck.

Jan said that there was so much burning paper at the shrine that it was causing polution. So they stopped handing out paper. She got the fortunes on her phone (she had Chinese, Thai and English language translations). Jan didn’t show them to us there, but saved them for a beer stop later in the food tour.

But I won’t keep you in suspense. My number was 2. After the tour, Jan sent us the text by WhatsApp, so I can cut and paste my fortune here to eliminate any possible transcription errors. Mine said, and I kid you not, “The person who receives ticket number 2, will have a happy and prosperous future. Everyone in your family is pleased for you.”

Let me repeat, everyone in my family is pleased for me.

Oh, yeah. The food tour.

The stops on the food tour were almost entirely for street food. By that I mean that the food was eaten, and often prepared, on the sidewalk or an underused street. There were small tables at every stop. We didn’t have to eat standing up. One exception to the street food was a Chinese restaurant that was indoors and air conditioned.

“A Chinese restaurant, “you ask? “I thought Bangkok is in Thailand. Why not Thai?” Bangklok has a blend of Asian cuisines, with a large contingent of Chinese. Most of the tour was through Chinatown, including along a narrow market street that had more character than it knew what to do with.

The food stops included Thai, Chinese and an Indonesian dish (satay).

After the tour, Jan handed us each small pieces of paper with the English transliteration of the name of each dish along with a description of them, which is how I could remember them below.

I also took pictures of the dishes and have posted them here for your viewing pleasure. Before I get into that, let me just say this one thing because it applies to all of them. Everything was very tasty and bursting with flavour.

Food tour stop 1:

Kao-phad Kra-prow-kai. Stir fired chicken with basil & chili atop rice.

Before we started the tour, Jan asked us if we wanted our food not spicy, moderately spice, or Thai spicy. That mainly applied to this dish.

We all said “Thai spicy,” When Jan brought the dishes she said they saw we (the tour customers) weren’t from here so they toned the Thai spicy down a bit. I had no trouble handling the spiciness of it, but I don’t think I could have gone much spicier.

Food tour stop 2:

Somtam Thai, Papaya salad Thai stye

This was very refreshing. It didn’t have much heat, but it had an exceptionally flavourful dressing.

Food tour stop 3:

Kha-nom-jeeb-kung, Shrimp dumplings; and Salapao sai moo daeng, Steamed buns with red pork

This was a two-dish stop. To be honest, both dishes were similar to dishes that I’ve had back home in Toronto and elsewhere in North America for dim sum. I don’t think they are any better, or any worse, here than back home. But I really enjoy them back home, so I really enjoyed them here.

This was the indoor, air conditioned stop.

Food tour stop 4:

Kao-kha-moo, Stewed pork leg with rice

This one was really delicious. The dish itself wasn’t spicy, but on the table there are some raw green chili peppers, chunks of raw garlic, and a vinegary liquid sauce with bits of red something mixed in there.

The idea is you’re supposed to take a raw chili, garlic, and sauce with each bite. I didn’t do it with each bite, but with a few. The chili added considerable heat to it.

Food tour stop 5:

Moo/Kai satae. Pork and chicken satay

If you’ve ever had satay, you know what this is. There were enough skewers of pork and chicken that we could each have one or two of each. The meat was exceptionally tender and the peanut sauce was delicious.

Food tour stop 6:

Kouy tea ped, Duck noodle soup

The broth had a very deeply meaty flavour and the noodles were very tender. Again, this was a wonderful dish. Not quite like any Pho that I’ve ever had or any Ramen, but its in that general family and terrific.

I didn’t notice until looking at the picture assicuated with this stop that my legs below the bottom of my shorts are quite ugly. But that has nothing to do with the food tour per se.

Food tour stop 7:

Khanom Baung, Thai crispy pancake

It looks like a taco, but only the shell. Jan originally asked for sweet for all of us, but she said they also have savoury. Josh said he wanted savoury, the rest has sweet. In the picture, Josh’s is the one with green bits in it.

I forget what the filling is made of. But, like everything on the tour, it was very good.

Food stop 8:

Bualoy nam khing, Black sesame dumplings in ginger tea

If you look at the picture, this dish looks like a soup with some kind of, maybe fish, dumplings. It’s not. The “broth” is a very gingery ginger tea served hot. But, like a soup, you drink the tea with a spoon.

The dumplings are served cold in the hot tea. I don’t know what the outside is made of, but the inside is sesame that tastes almost a little peanuty.

Food tour stop 9:

Pa Tong Ko, Chinese donut with pandan custard

This was our last stop. It was fried dough with a green dipping sauce (not in the picture). They’re called donuts, but they’re not in a shape that we think of as a donut. They were big blobs. The dough was very light. It almost melted in you mouth. The dipping sauce was quite tasty.

The deep fryers for frying the dough are right out on the sidewalk. Hanging from the stand are two pieces of paper claiming they were recogized by Michelin two years in a row. The donuts were very tasty, but colour me skeptical.

(There was also a stop just for beer a couple stops before the end. I didn’t bother taking a picture of the beer. I had a glass, but I’m not a huge beer drinker. It was okay. But it was beer. The brand was “Leo.”)

The tour was advertised as lasting for three hours, it lasted for a little more than three and a half hours. By the end, I was absolutely stuffed.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts from Bangkok that the hotel I’m staying at, because I have status in their loyalty program, offers me free wine and apetizers from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. I’ve been going every day. Today, I made it back in time for the last hour or so of that. And I did go down for my sparkling wine. But I passed on the appetizers.

Not only that, but despite not having lunch today, I also passed on dinner. My hotel leaves me some fresh fruit in my room every day. Dinner for me tonight was an apple and a Mandarin orange. And I was more than full with that.

Bangkok Summary

I booked into Bankgok for five nights, which translates into four full days, plus the bit of the afternoon when I arrived.

Bangkok is an interesting, and in some ways fascinating city, but without a lot of blockbuster tourist sights. The wats (temples) are spectacular and there are a lot of them. But once you’ve seen a half dozen or so of the top ones, that’s probalby enough.

The long and the short of it is, I really enjoyed Bangkok, but the length of this visit was probably enough to see the major, and some of the minor, sights in the city.

But here’s the thing, Bangkok is an incredibly spread out city. And some sights that I thought about going to intersted me, but not enough that I wanted to spend and hour and a quarter each way to see them.

And there are sidetrips out of the city that you can take that I didn’t take. I looked at a couple. One is a half-day tour that takes in a floating market and a railway market outside of the city. At the floating market vendors ply their trade from boats.

At the railway market, the market stalls are on either side of a railway track. Slow trains do come by and when they do, everyone has to clear off the tracks. It sounds interesting. A few companies run the same tour and they’re usually advertized as being five to seven hours.

Another one I looked at is to some ancient temples in Ayutthaya. From the pictures I’ve seen the temples don’t look like any of the ones I’ve seen in Bangkok. They look much older and made of stone. The tour pictures include buddha images and buddha faces embedded in muti-trunk trees. It looks very interesting. Again, a few different companies run those tours. Their usualy at least six or seven hours, and some as long as more than 11 hours.

I would have liked to go, but, for one thing, I probably needed another day or two here to take them both in. For another, most of the tours here start at 8:00 am, or even earlier. I can’t get moving that quickly in the morning. Some of the tour organizers will pick you up at your hotel if you’re within their pickup area, but they come to pick you up earlier than if you meet them at their meeting point at the advertised starting time.

So, should I have booked more days here? I guess it depends on whether I could have pushed myself in the morning.

All that being said, I’m very pleased that I got to visit Bangkok.