Today we hoped to take the sky train. We wanted to go to some of the historical sites around Bangkok but sadly after taking a closer look at the map the train ran on one side of the hotel and all the things we wanted to see the other. Typical. We jumped in a taxi, a bright pink one of course, and asked him to take us to the area for the Grand Palace. It wasn’t a long journey and I was quite glad of the AC in the taxi. To go to the temples we had to wear clothes with long legs, sleeves and in theory cover our feet with more than flip flops – we put the hotel freebee slippers in our bag for emergency foot covers as long trousers and shirts were making us hot enough without having to wear trainers.
The Grand palace was amazing right from the start, everything I thought the Forbidden City lacked (It was about 100 times smaller and all crammed together, no huge sweeping courtyards to be filled with adoring public, guards, or even chrysanthemums - V). It was crammed with beautiful statues painted murals and towering buildings shaped like the Thai Buddha’s hat. The giant gate guards had to be some of my favourites as they were huge coloured statues standing at each entrance way with comical expressions and were about 15 foot high. Although it was extremely hot we walked around for hours taking literally hundreds of photographs and reading or guide about the history. Our flip flops appeared to be ok footwear too so we didn’t have to resort to the slippers! At one point some art students came up to us saying they were doing some research and could I do them a sketch. It was quite good fun to sit in the shade and do a little cartoon version of the statue men holding up the layers of the tall conical buildings. We had ice creams for lunch!
After a short break and a can of Coke we went to look for the reclining Buddha. Apparently he was big and gold and a must see sight. We walked round and found the entrance, getting accosted by various street vendors on the way, Vincent bought me a set of conical bronze finger nails like in curse of the golden flower! The reclining Buddha was in a huge hall in a garden which had a little water fall with an cat, real, lying there so we sat down for a while relaxing in the amazing scenery and listening to the water fall and stroking the cat. After I decided that I wanted to do the garden first and the main event last, I thought I would be too tired and just want to go if I did the main thing first. The garden was much like the other with the conical towers made up of loads of shiny tiles, statues of men that looked like terracotta warriors and beautiful trees and flowers. Next it was on to the Buddha. After walking the entire way round the hall trying to find the entrance we queued up and were instructed by a Dalek like voice coming from a loud hailer to ‘take of shoes, put in box’ then we went in. The Buddha wasn’t big, it was huge! All made of gold he must have been 20 foot high and more than 100 foot long, and he was lying down showing the soles of his feet – this is generally not done but maybe he’s allowed? Vincent had the idea of taking pictures all the way along to try and make a big long picture out of them so we walked the length taking photos all the way. When we reached his feet I remembered that he was one of the earliest examples of knowledge of fingerprints, besides cave drawings and some evidence in China, so I took loads of pictures of his feet with their swirly prints to add to my forensics lecture on fingerprint history when I get home.
Now I was totally shattered and had taken almost 200 photographs so it was time to go home. Getting a taxi on the way back was a nightmare and they all wanted us to pay 200, as we only paid 65 on the way there we kept asking them to put it on the meter, but they kept saying ‘traffic busy’. The taxis are not like the ones in China where you only pay for distance but when you are stationary the money doesn’t click over very fast I guess and they wanted to fleece some tourists. Eventually we found one who would charge us by meter and the traffic was horrendous. He knew a little short cut, but then so did everyone else so after ages of being in the taxi my knee seizing up I wanted to walk the last bit. We ended up giving him 110 baht and explaining that we could see the hotel so we would walk.
The plan was that I would have a bath, Vincent would pop to the gym, then we would go and find the sky train and find STA travel to get our tickets for the train to Singapore, sadly I fell asleep!