Day 97: BANGkok

I couldn't think of a better way to follow up last night's Phad Thai dinner than having Phad Thai for breakfast! Yum! There were five little set meals we could choose for the breakfast that was included with our hotel, and we all chose Phad Thai, so I guess that's a good sign.

Our first stop this morning was a walk over to Khao San road - pretty much the most well known backpacker street in the world and where Beth and I have stayed twice before. Back in 1997, this was the place to go to arrange flights, meet up with friends, shop, eat and drink - and its primary function has not really changed. For sure it's way more built up, but you still see the really eclectic mix of tourists and locals here. The locals are pretty hardened to the tough world of dealing with savvy travellers. The tourists come in all forms - rookies that are right off the plane, seasoned mid or multi trip backpackers, and ones that look like they've been on Khao San road for a long time. Us ? I guess we were somewere in the middle, but we were really just observers, not "needing" anything from the place, which felt like a good position to be in while strolling around with the kids.

The girls were happy to see tons of Tuk Tuks parked around the area. Since the cool cyclos in Siem Reap, they'd been talking about the Tuk Tuks in Bangkok and the prospect of riding them a lot.

We went into the first shop we saw, and Robin wanted to buy everything she could lay her hands on. I gently suggested we pump the brakes on that. My favourite expression, I've been told by the girls, is "we'll have plenty of time to do/buy that later" - it's not their favourite Expression, but to be honest, I haven't been too off the mark. As usual, there are a fair number of tour operators on Khaosan Road.... As Buddy the Elf discovered, we were so surprised to find the "best" travel agent....

We started walking in the general direction of some sights, but quickly figured it would be too hot to do much walking. We hailed a passing Tuk Tuk and quickly negotiated the fee to take us to Wat Saket. We enjoyed our first Tuk Tuk ride together...

Wat Saket, otherwise known as the Golden Mountain, is a little slice of paradise in the middle of one of the most expansive cities in the world. The complex is an artificial mountain with a huge stuppa on top the houses a number of Buddhist shrines, however the beauty of the place is in the landscaping of the lower exterior, and the overall presentation. When you have to pick and choose carefully what and how many temples you want to see with two kids in tow, focusing on aesthetics and uniqueness really keeps the interest level high.... I actually haven't heard Robin say "do we have to see another temple!!?" In a few weeks...

There's a nice series of bells where Abby redeemed herself from her admittedly comical first attempt in Vientiane from ringing a large gong:

When we got to the first upper level, we made our little donation to get a lotus flower, candle, incense and gold foil paper so the girls could do the little Buddhist prayer ritual.... Then we bought a Popsicle from the little drink vendor... Lol

The further climb up to the top had us emerge into the beating sunlight... Man that sun was hot. It felt like we had not been in the heat for a month... And actually, we hadn't - Borneo was quite temperate and Cameron Highlands was great (oops, forgot about the heat of KL... Scratch that!). The view of the city at the top was great, as was the golden stuppa rising high into the sky above us. With a view from above, you can really see the mix of old and new in Bangkok - there are so many temples and objects of worship mixed into the modern web of streets and buildings.

Beth spotted this atop the temple... Too funny. Come on Malaysia, even temples in Thailand have free high speed Internet!

A quick discussion with four or five drivers and we were back in and headed to another popular sight - Wat Benchamabophit. This place is knows as the Marble Temple, and is more of s traditional Thai Buudhist temple, but with a twist - yes, the main temple walls and exterior floors are all made of marble! We entered the main temple and waded through a bit of a crowd to see this impressive, perhaps 15 foot tall, golden Buddha.

Abby noticed some impressive stained glass windows, which you also don't see too much of. I'm continually impressed with the kids level of detail when it comes to visiting these places - "hey Dad, that looks like the naga outside the main palace in Vientiane" - so cool you noticed that a Robin!

Interestingly, in the covered walkway around the courtyard surrounding the temple, they had maybe 100 black Buddhas cast in metal. They were from statues (often broken ones) recovered, restored then modelled, from around Southeast Asia. Here again, it was cool to see the kids power of observation: "that one looks Japanese! Ah yes, the plaque says it's from a temple in Kyoto" said Abby.

Time for lunch. Would we have Phad Thai for the third meal in a row? We wrangled a taxi that accepted to turn his meter on, and jumped in for the relatively short ride back to Khaosan Road. Abby loved the sticker in the back of the cab and it certainly fit the driver's dry sense of humour.... At least I think he was funny.... After being spoiled with high quality English being spoken throughout Malaysia, we are adjusting back to a "Vietnam" level English fluency in Thailand.... But I'm pretty sure the sticker was universal in its meaning....

Gotta say, it's nice to have cheap and available beer everywhere after practically living in a convent over the last month! So far, Chang is the best, with Leo last and not too many prospects of it moving it up the ranks. Pretty bad.... It tasted like Canadian or Coors Light (sorry Banka!).

We did manage to have a fantastic red and amazing green curry for lunch... So far, Thailand is not disappointing on the food front. Back in a Tuk Tuk and we were off to the Grand Palace - our first experience with extreme crowds since Himeji Castle in Japan - and that was completely organized and in moderate temperatures!

The grand palace is the most popular tourist sight in Thailand, and it showed. First off, we knew we had to be covered up, as they are very strict. Beth was quite happy as I tried on several pairs of, what I call "traveller pants" (the ugly, usually elephant patterned cheap pants that you see 80% of backpackers wearing in Southeast Asia - I just don't get it, there's no nice term for them... They're just fugly!) in order to pass the dress code. It was pretty funny to look around and see many other male tourists wearing makeshift cover ups.

The sun was just pounding down, and I could sense we were losing #2 and #4 quickly. We pushed on past the nice grounds, through over one million Chinese tourists and over to the ticket gate. I asked if there was a lineup... A wait.... You know, a queu?!?! And when the ticket sales lady finally understood, she indicated that there was no wait to get it (I'm quite sure we would have had a mutiny and turned away if she said there was anywhere over a three minute line to get in!). We hustled in, striving for the shakiest section of the inner palace.

The inner palace grounds are really an eclectic hodgepodge of ornate temples, all crowded into a pretty minor space. It's almost like it was a case of one upmanship that you would see in other areas that had a ton of geography (Angkor and Bagan in Myanmar are two examples where you had sprawling land and many attempts over hundreds of years of building yet a bigger, greater temple) yet done in the confined area of this palatial courtyard.

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of beauty in there, just look at my wife and my pantaloons as two prime examples....

No, there was a lot of beauty, but it just wasn't laid out in a nice way. The largest of the buildings was the temple of the Emerald Buddha, the most important temple and national symbolic place in Thailand. Reaching the middle courtyard, the palace started to open up and show its potential. The grounds buildings there more closely resembled European architecture and design, right down to "bobby"-like guard posted throughout.

It was damn hot, add we had more plans for a long evening (hah, we didn't know the half of it then!), so we grabbed a cab and went back to the hotel for a forced rest. Turns out, it wasn't too forced - Beth slept about an hour or so,,but we had to wake the girls up after close to two hours. I guess the heat and longish travel day yesterday had worn them out.

We had a food tour planned for the evening - a daring attempt at seeing more night action, as it was to run from 8:00 until midnight. The girls actually got their butts in gear by about 6:50, and by 7:00 we were in the cab on the short ride to our meeting place at Chit Lom station. We kind of hit a wall of traffic by 7:15, and by 7:30, having not budged an inch and having a pretty good idea where we were, I decided it was best to walk the rest. We hopped out, tipping the driver nicely after feeling bad we'd abandoned him in this sea of cars.

We started walking up, noticing a ton of pedestrians were doing the same things - both in our direction and in the opposite way. Eventfully we got to an intersection where I knew we were pretty much under the elevated station. We'd surmised that there must have been a big accident nearby, as the traffic hadn't moved. Just then, at about 7:40, we saw people desperately waving emergency vehicles through the intersection. Ok, plan B, find another way into the station as there was no way we were getting across there.

We found our way up to the skywalk through an adjacent mall, but when we got to the monorail station and I asked where exit 1 was, they told us we had to go down to the street level, walk further down the street, then up another stair, basically circumnavigating the station to the other side. The street was pretty empty, so we moved quickly. Eventually, we met our tour group, just in time. Apparently there were twenty in our group, but we were to go as the first ten in a group with a young woman named Mod. I immediately liked her take charge, open and friendly manner.

We walked down to street level together, as I customarily started peppering her with questions (are we that annoying Alex?), and we made our way past sirens and hundreds of idling cars. We eventually turned on a quiet,side,street and found our team of Tuk tuks waiting for us. We were to ride two to a Tuk Tuk, so Robin and I paired up. It wasn't long before I noticed that traffic was really inhibiting us. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed like we did a big loop around a few blocks in order to come at the area in a different direction. After quite a bit of waiting (Robin was in her element in the Tuk Tuk at night.... I was doing math trying to figure out how we were going to get to six stops tonight if we were delayed by 20 minutes getting to the first one.

We made it to the first place, and on tap was chicken rice. Now we figured chicken rice was chicken rice. We were all "meh" about it as the one in Singapore that Anthony Bourdain was flaunting was just ok, but I have to say, this one was awesome! In Thai style, it was a little spicy with a nice sauce and the chicken wasn't "slimy" (Abby's favourite Asian chicken descriptor).

Out of the blue, Mod said that if anyone didn't want to continue tonight, they would offer a full refund, as they weren't sure about the traffic, and they'd heard there was an explosion from a car or motorbike not too far away that was causing all of the problems. We thought, no, we'd been saving our appetites for this and had forced the girls to nap... We were gung ho!

Then ten minutes later, Mod informed us they were cancelling the tour because they felt it could be a security risk to continue. You didn't really have to tell us twice. I didn't have data on my phone yet and information was sparse, but we got the feeling either the explosion wasn't an accident, or I had visions of a train crash evacuation from our house in the late 70's. Either way, we were ok with rescheduling (as Beth started gobbling down more of the chicken rice! We were hungry and could sense something worse than impending danger....food scarcity!)

I was very impressed with Mod and her organization - there was no hesitation in handling the situation.... I mentally compared it to the North Borneo Express and imagined Mod saying "sir, technically your journey has come to and end". No, not her. I felt bad for the young American couple who were here for, get this, 8 days in Thailand, who were flying home tomorrow.... But then Mod gave us some consolation sticky rice, mango and coconut milk and I forgot all about their predicament.....

We made our way home, flying down empty streets in our Tuk Tuks. Robin and I were having a blast, but Beth and Abby, who had Mod in their vehicle, we're getting more detailed information on the problem. At that moment, they now thought it was a bomb and that their was significant loss of life. Yikes. It was strange observing the drivers and locals after that on the way home. You could tell they didn't know how to act - they hadn't been conditioned yet by an event like 9/11.... They were kind of nervously laughing it off, though with obviously sketchy information at that point.

When we got back to the hotel, we got the news that "your friends" have been calling you. Yikes. I guess our savvy friend Jen had put together our itinerary, called the hotel and they'd told her we hopped in a cab around 7 on the way to Chit Lom station, just 300 meters from the shrine that had been targeted in the bomb. Now, it turns out we hadn't even left the hotel when the bomb went off, but from a zillion miles away, it didn't look good. We got on our devices quickly and messaged family and fiends. Thank you to tech savvy, traveling news junkies Jen, Brian, Steve and Papa for getting in touch quickly.

I could yada yada yada the rest, but instead I will just keep it short. We were safe and we were doing the best to inform the kids what was going on without spooking them. One funny thing was when we got to the lobby, there was a German woman with her two kids, kind of staring at the TV. The news was pretty frantic and it was obvious to us that something major was happening - when we told the woman, she said she had no clue anything had happened. Did you think that was a movie?

It was not a fun evening in the end. My completely unprofessional opinion on the situation after gathering as many facts as were known at the time was that it seemed more amateurish than professional - ie it felt more like the creepy, crazy kids in Boston than a well planned, well funded operation that you would see in movies or say roughly 14 years ago in New York and DC.

Fingers crossed for us and the people of Bangkok for the next few days, and sympathies for the victims tonight.