Thailand

Today was another early start as we began our journey home. We were up 3am and out the door by 4am. We got to the airport by 4:30am and we were in our first flight at 6:50am to Tokyo. We had a plane change and an airport change in Tokyo for a total of of a 7 hour layover. We went through customs and collected our luggage and caught the Narita Express train to...

After the train market we boarded a long tail boat and entered the camel system to the Damnoen Saduak floating markets. It’s a pretty big tourist area where you can float around to different vendors for food or souvenirs. The boat driver paddles around to any vendor you fancy so you can bargain for anything you like. On shore, there was a guy with a Slow Loris, which...

This morning we joined a tour that would take us to the train market and floating market. Another early morning with a 6:15am pickup because the markets were about an hour from the city.We were driven to a train stop in the middle of nowhere and boarded the train to the first market. The market is literally on the train tracks so wherever a train passes through, the...

These were taken on our way home from our afternoon of exploring.

The next stop was the flower market. Here hundreds of thousands of the flowers are brought for processing and selling. The orange and yellow ones look like carnations. Many were being turned into arrangements that are seen at the Buddhist temples. The flower markets are open 24 hours a day and are busiest in the very early hours of the morning (about 3 or 4 o’clock)...

The next day we headed back to the river and joined a hop on, hop off boat tour. It repeated some of what we saw yesterday so we skipped those stops to visit the areas we didn’t see. Chinatown was the first stop and included the Golden Buddha. This Buddha is solid gold and weighs 5.5 tons. At one point the statue was covered in stucco and glass in order to conceal...

Our last stop on our journey up river was the Grand Palace. This was by far the most expensive attraction we had to pay admission, about $20. The others were either free or $2-$4. You also cannot enter the palace grounds unless you have long pants to cover your legs as assign of respect. There was no way we were wearing pants in 32°C and high humidity weather. So we...

Our next stop on our river tour was Wat Pho. The temple is first on the list of six temples in Thailand classed as the highest grade of the first-class royal temples. It is associated with King Rama I who rebuilt the temple complex on an earlier temple site, and became his main temple where some of his ashes are enshrined. The temple was later expanded and...

The Wat Arun complex was huge so here are a few more photos of another area.

On our first full day in Bangkok we boarded a local water taxi and headed to a few major monuments located near the shore of the river. The first stop was Wat Arun. One of Thailand’s most famous Buddhist temples is Wat Arun in Bangkok, a wat named for the Hindu god of the dawn, Arun. As a result, this structure is also known as the Temple of Dawn, which is just...