My love for the road in a vehicle I can't afford; visiting places with a plan I don't have (ripped from Baby Driver). Sipping in the way of life of people I don't know, jotting down the moments with my loved ones. Keeping close at heart the memories that will be made, and be reminisced about in years to come. For at the end, these treasures are more than silver or gold.
For the second day, the plan was to hit the boat pier and then take a river ride downwards to the city area. From the map, there was a pier like 7 minutes away. I did a Grab and it was not expensive. Our driver arrived and we were surprised that he spoke perfect english. He was quite chatty and told us that his mother worked in Thai airlines and he learned english since young. That morning, we experienced the infamous Bangkok jam. He had missed a wrong turn and had to make an U-turn to get us to the destination. However, the u-turn took very long due to the bumper to bumper jam. Definitely a lose money ride for him. We were to learn quite number of things from him, that in fact, the official name of Bangkok was like a super long name and was in fact in the guiness book of record for that. The children had to use a song to learn the entire name by heart.
Upon reaching the pier, we realised that the boat pier was closed. There was a group of motorbike taxis and one of them was so helpful that he went to the road to help us flag down a cab. However, in our confusion and the lack of english, we couldn't understand what they were trying to tell us and I had at first thought that he was trying to scam us. Later I thanked him, and we hop on to a metered taxi which brought us to the other side of the river. it seemed that the other side of the pier was operational.
The other pier turned out to be just behind a temple and we had to walked through it (Btw, for this trip, we totally avoided temples. Temples were not quite our thing and we didn't want to waste time and money on it). At first we thought it was wrong again, but after asking some nice people, they pointed us to the right place. It was an interesting place, and the entire pier was infested with pigeons!.
A bought some bread for Raiden so that he could feed the swarm of catfishes below the pier. At that time (around 10am), there wasn't many people waiting for the boat. 10 minutes later, a boat came. As we were making our way to the boat, it sped off. The ticketing girl shouted some thing at us. We then realised that the norm for boarding the boat was as fast as possible as the boat wouldn't wait if we were slow to board. So for the next boat that came (around another 15 minutes), we quickly rush up as soon as it stop.
The boat ride was super cheap, just 15 baht per person. And that was irregardless of where you will alight. So you could take a long ride for a cheap fare of 15 bahts.
Comments