I had an early start on Saturday morning (7.15am) as I joined a tour to the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market, which is about an hour and a half drive from Bangkok. When we got off the bus, we took a short boat ride along the residential canals leading up to the market. The postcards of the floating market often show wooden canoes laden with multicoloured fruits and vegetables paddled by Thai women wearing wide brimmed straw hats. This quintessential picture of Thailand is, however, over 20 years old and is more a piece of history. Today there are rows and rows of souvenir stands lining the canals and the only way to get to them is on narrow boats. The boat rides only last about 30 minutes but there are so many boats jostling to get past that there isn’t time to stop to even try to bargain for purchases. You can still buy the odd bit of fruit from the vendors on the water – bananas and rock apples (the first time I have tried them). The pollution on the water from the motorised boats is also fairly bad and as the boats are full and low on the water, you have to be careful not to move about too much, otherwise you are in danger of capsizing the whole boat and getting a mouthful of abuse from the women steering the boats.
From the floating market we headed onto an elephant farm where I took a 25 minute ride on a 25 year old female elephant (whose name I forget). The guy leading my elephant got off her to take some photos with my camera. He did ask me if I wanted to ride on her neck (I was riding on a seat attached to her shoulders) but I declined on the basis that I would probably not be able to get back on the seat again. My elephant was hungry and kept on stopping to munch on large chunks of bushes.
After the elephant farm, we went to a snake farm to see a snake show. The performers jab at the snakes to narrowly avoid getting bitten by poisonous cobras a la Steve Irwin style. The commentator said that guys do die during the show if they get bitten and showed us a picture of the unfortunate fellow who bit the dust last year from a snake bite. Mind you, I am not surprised the snakes go for these guys, as there was a large cobra which was swung about by its tail, thrashed around in the water and thrown head first into the wall of the arena a number of times. I am surprised it wasn’t brain damaged in the process. Poor thing. It was good to see the snakes and they showed how to extract poison from the cobra but the RSPCA would have a heart attack as the show is cruel to the snakes (especially when they shoved a cobra into a glass box with a mongoose in it and the mongoose proceded to attack the snake (which they do in the wild).
On the way back to Bangkok we stopped off at a carving factory, where you could see the carvers from all over the world carve huge intricate murals. Pretty impressive indeed. The final stop was a large gem factory where I was surprisingly restrained (I am waiting till I get to Dubai where I can do some hard bargaining with my mother).
After the tour ended, I headed over to Chatuchak Weekend Market, which is the behemoth of Thai markets. It is only open at weekends and 15,000 stalls cater to an estimated 200,000 visitors a days. You can buy everything here – food, snakes, live chickens, crafts, antiques, herbal remedies, household goods, camping gear, clothes and more. There are aisles and aisles of stalls and you think that you are nearly at the end of a row when it continues further. I only managed to stay there a couple of hours, as I had to be back at the hotel for the Intrepid welcome talk at 6pm and I think I only scratched the surface.
Back at the hotel I met the 12 people I will be travelling with on the Intrepid Indochina Loop trip. They all seem quite nice – a couple of English women, Germans, Americans and Norwegians. Our tour guide, Blair, is a Kiwi. We all went for dinner near the Kho San Road, which is the party scene for backpackers.
From the floating market we headed onto an elephant farm where I took a 25 minute ride on a 25 year old female elephant (whose name I forget). The guy leading my elephant got off her to take some photos with my camera. He did ask me if I wanted to ride on her neck (I was riding on a seat attached to her shoulders) but I declined on the basis that I would probably not be able to get back on the seat again. My elephant was hungry and kept on stopping to munch on large chunks of bushes.
After the elephant farm, we went to a snake farm to see a snake show. The performers jab at the snakes to narrowly avoid getting bitten by poisonous cobras a la Steve Irwin style. The commentator said that guys do die during the show if they get bitten and showed us a picture of the unfortunate fellow who bit the dust last year from a snake bite. Mind you, I am not surprised the snakes go for these guys, as there was a large cobra which was swung about by its tail, thrashed around in the water and thrown head first into the wall of the arena a number of times. I am surprised it wasn’t brain damaged in the process. Poor thing. It was good to see the snakes and they showed how to extract poison from the cobra but the RSPCA would have a heart attack as the show is cruel to the snakes (especially when they shoved a cobra into a glass box with a mongoose in it and the mongoose proceded to attack the snake (which they do in the wild).
On the way back to Bangkok we stopped off at a carving factory, where you could see the carvers from all over the world carve huge intricate murals. Pretty impressive indeed. The final stop was a large gem factory where I was surprisingly restrained (I am waiting till I get to Dubai where I can do some hard bargaining with my mother).
After the tour ended, I headed over to Chatuchak Weekend Market, which is the behemoth of Thai markets. It is only open at weekends and 15,000 stalls cater to an estimated 200,000 visitors a days. You can buy everything here – food, snakes, live chickens, crafts, antiques, herbal remedies, household goods, camping gear, clothes and more. There are aisles and aisles of stalls and you think that you are nearly at the end of a row when it continues further. I only managed to stay there a couple of hours, as I had to be back at the hotel for the Intrepid welcome talk at 6pm and I think I only scratched the surface.
Back at the hotel I met the 12 people I will be travelling with on the Intrepid Indochina Loop trip. They all seem quite nice – a couple of English women, Germans, Americans and Norwegians. Our tour guide, Blair, is a Kiwi. We all went for dinner near the Kho San Road, which is the party scene for backpackers.
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