This morning we resolved that one day of tuk-tuk riding was fun enough (if you can imagine a golf cart with a petrol engine driven by someone who says he has a licence and that the drivers with uniforms are government tuk-tuks, flitting in between buses and taxis and on the wrong side of the road when there’s only motorcycles coming the other way and over bridges then you’ve got the picture).
So we stuffed ourselves full or breakfast (yes they do have the tiny sweet bananas here) and got a taxi from our hotel to the Golden Mount. Now I might have implied in yesterday’s entry that the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha were the highlight of the trip so far.
And they were.
But the Golden Mount is better. The temple is at the top of a spiralling forested staircase, where one finds a hilarious donation box: attached to the box is a small speaker which plays repetitively the message ‘admission is 10 baht – thank you, admission is 10 baht – thank you’ and so on.
The temple has the usual collection of highly decorated buddhas with offerings ranging from touching to bizarre (e.g. a tiny box of cereal or a can of coke).
But on the roof – which had about three square metres of shade in the blazing 10am sun, is a huge golden spire. Probably about 15m high, if not 20, and this is actually the main attraction. Secondarily the view is awesome, and having been taken on some slightly long short-cuts yesterday we were in a good position to identify various landmarks.
We couldn’t quite work out how a huge golden spire could be an object of devotion for Buddhists, or why a country like Thailand which is very bright to begin with should need a vast collection of very shiny golden things. But the spire is really quite magnificent (can someone back home start a superlative counter and work out when we start repeating ourselves?) and worthy of seeing on it’s own.
Then it started getting really really hot on the roof so went back down through the hordes of visiting school children to find out how much it would cost us for a canal boat to the Jim Thompson house. Jim Thompson was a US soldier who was posted to Thailand just at the end of the second world war and decided that he would rather stay. He made a mint exporting silk from Thailand and reviving the dying art of hand-weaving silk in the process.
With a part of the mint made he bought 3 adjoining blocks of land on the canal and on that land he built a house constructed from 6 other traditional Thai houses which he had bought and moved to the site. Included in the 100B admission was a half-hour tour conducted in English. Turns out that Benjarong part of the Benjarong thai restaurant in Bathurst means ‘5 colours’ and refers to a traditional style of pottery which used, wait for it… 5 colours (usually black, red, yellow, green and white). Also in the house were various antiques collected by Mr. Jim Thompson such as a 1300-year old statue of a standing buddha and some other incredibly old stuff like that. The house itself is really quite magnificent.
We were then pleased to find that what looked on the map like a short walk back to our hotel was actually a very short walk. We came back with plans of having a swim (there’s less clouds today so the heat is a bit more vibrant), and then having a nap so that we can stay awake for the first few hours of our flight tonight and arrive in Rome at 6am having had a normal night’s sleep, but instead scrapped those plans and went straight to sleep for an hour or so.
Which was very refreshing.
After that we went wandering through some back-streets and had late lunch in a cafeteria type-place, then walked up and down through the vast MBK shopping mall, wasted 70B on a cappucino that tasted like it had been strained through a sock, watched the evening rain roll in and then wet back to the hotel to pack up, have another shower before the flight and taxi it out to the airport.
Which is where the real fun started. We had 440B left and grand plans to leave Thailand without much spare currency. The taxi from the airport was 340B… so the one back shouldn’t be much more. Right?
You might say we were surprised to discover that the two bottles of water from our room fridge (total 90B) were not actually added to our room bill or taken from the deposit we put down at check-in. Instead, despite the fact that the inventory receipt tells you not to pay with cash, we went downstairs to check out and… they asked us to pay by cash. We did that and then we had 350B left. Plus some coins. So 354B…and 5 cents.
We were further surprised to discover that if you ask the taxi booking service at the hotel the ride to the airport is now 900B. We went out front of the hotel and stopped the closest taxi, who also expected it to be 900B (he’s obviously driven people from this hotel before…), however he relented surprisingly quickly from 900 down to 400 when we asked for 350. But, he says, the traffic, and also, the toll on the new highway to the airport… how will he make any money? Same way the metered taxi which bought us in did, I suppose.
He then agreed to do it for 350 when we showed him that was literally all we had left in our wallet!
He was right about the traffic; it did take longer to get onto the motorway… but he more than made up for it, possibly in the hope of getting back to town for another 900B fare, by driving down the motorway somewhere between 110 and 140 (!) kph, jumping over lanes and flashing the lights a couple of times to encourage and advise the other drivers. Did we mention that most Thai taxis have seat belts but no buckles?
Anyway we managed to arrive at the airport in time (amazingly), played team-solitaire at the check-in gate for a bit and then deleted the boring photos off the camera. The flight itself was uneventful, apart from the fact that Alice slept like a log while I couldn’t really get comfortable and sort of drifted in and out for maybe 4 or 5 hours. At some point we saw what I think must have been Istanbul and then Athens glowing somewhere down below the window, followed by the sunrise, followed by the boot of Italy.
Greg
