Bangkok - travel diary - part 1

Arriving late in the evening in Bangkok, we struggled quite a bit to find a guest house to spend the night, but in the end, as usual, fortune helped us. An accommodation that initially seemed terrible, especially because of the very small size of the rooms (they seemed like cages, cells or thereabouts), but then we got used to it and all in all it wasn't so bad... the price, moreover, was really low!

Bangkok truly offers everything you want... ask and it shall be given to you... whatever you are looking for, anything, in Bangkok you can have it! Incredible! We spent the first day bewildered by the size of the city, trying to understand it, to capture its essence... but in Bangkok it's not easy. Our guest house was near one of the liveliest and most crowded (with tourists) neighborhoods of the whole city: Khao San Road. It is a street where a large open-air market develops that offers above all clothing items. The interesting thing is that you can find branded products (even from important Italian brands) at truly ridiculous prices. For this reason too we spent the following two days shopping. We looked like raving lunatics, children in the land of toys, bees on honey... it wasn't easy to disconnect, but after 48 hours of non-stop shopping, we managed to detox.

In the evening we returned towards our guest house and had a meeting that is nothing short of fundamental if you really want to understand Bangkok: a Tuk Tuk man. To get around the city there are essentially two ways: the taxi or the tuk tuk, which is a sort of Ape Piaggio adapted to transport people. The tuk tuks are everywhere, and everything illegal or not quite clean that is in Bangkok they can procure for you, indeed, they want to procure it for you. Tuk Tuk men, in fact, take a percentage of what they sell and, just to sell "collateral services," they are willing to take you around for free. It's not easy to explain this convoluted mechanism in a few words and perhaps this isn't even the place to do it... just one thing: if you happen to pass through here, be careful; try them to satisfy your curiosity, but in the end, believe us, it's better to take a regular taxi.

Jatu Jak market

I had said we had come out of the shopping tunnel... But not completely. We dedicated the fourth day to visiting another market: the Jatu Jak market. To get there we came up with a stratagem: we stopped a tuc tuc, and told him to take us where we wanted and in exchange we let him think that that very evening we would go where he wanted... but without promising anything and without giving anything for certain. In this way we managed to scrounge the round trip, without spending a penny: in the end we made up that one of the three of us was sick and the story ended there... it seems easy but it isn't!

But let's get back to the Jatu Jak market... truly colossal, a city within the city; not by chance is it the largest open-air market in the world! Needless to say, to go around it a map is necessary and despite that we still got lost a couple of times!

On the fifth day we thought it well to give ourselves a dose of culture... and so, using the same stratagem as the day before, we hired another tuc tuc. After making the usual promises, we headed to the Golden Mountain, a small hilltop on whose summit is built a characteristic temple (Wat Saket) with an immense golden dome in which the sacred ashes of the Lord Buddha are kept. Apart from this, it also offers a suggestive view of the city. Then it was the turn of the gigantic Standing Buddha, an immense reproduction of a golden Buddha rigorously standing (as the name suggests). We are not able to provide the precise dimensions, but believe us, it really is enormous! Last stop of the day the marble temple (Wat Benchamabophit), built according to classic Thai architecture, but with an entirely Italian material: white marble.

Thus ended our first part of the visit dedicated to Bangkok... at 9:30 on the same day we took the night train to northern Thailand... heading to Chiang Mai for three hard days of trekking.