Scott somehow came up with the idea that he wanted to get a haircut when we were in Thailand and had been gleefully looking forward to a Thai barbershop experience since before we even embarked on our trip. Today was finally the day. After breakfast at a cute bakery in our little neighborhood, we wandered around in search of a barber. We had to kill time before they opened so we strolled around a Japanese food market and Scott got a smoothie as a second breakfast.

The barber ended up being a barbess, and as expected, spoke little English, so I had to pull up pictures of Scott with the intended haircut to convey his wishes for this new do. Evidently this was Scott’s first wash, cut and dry experience, and he got a straight razor shave as well. He felt thoroughly pampered and the haircut turned out pretty well, but he did lament that the straight razor shave didn’t feel as smooth and comfortable as he had expected it to, as it seemed that it pulled the hairs more than a regular razor does. Regardless, he felt like a million bucks and was now ready to take on more of Bangkok.

We were actually headed 80 plus kilometers southwest of Bangkok today. Our destination was Maeklong, the smallest of the Thai provinces, and home to the Maeklong Railway market, the Amphawa floating market, and the famous conjoined “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng, although we would only be seeing the markets, and not the twins, since they died in 1874. We took a Bolt to Maeklong and amazingly it only cost about $25.

We started off by touring the Maeklong Railway Market which is nicknamed the Siang Tai (life risking) market. The market is, as the name suggests, along a railway. And by along a railway, I mean quite literally, along a railway; the awnings hang over the tracks and the various wares being peddled spill over onto them as well. What this means is that visitors to the market stroll down the actual railroad tracks, trying their best not to break ankles as they peruse the various stalls (seafood is the market’s specialty). What this also means, is that four times a day, a real-ass train strolls through the market. This means four times a day the vendors have to roll in the awnings, and scoop up their fish and racks of elephant pants so as to not get plowed down by the train. Tourists are on their own to hopefully be smart enough to tuck inside one of the stalls as the train passes.

We had time to kill before witnessing the train so we found a restaurant in the market for lunch. Scott had fried rice and another smoothie¹, and I had my first Leo beer and Tom Yum soup. I noted to Scott that this Tom Yum tasted much more vibrant and intense than what I’d had back home, and that I detected very strong notes of Lemon Pledge. A quick Google search helped me figure out that the big and tough leaves floating in the soup were kaffir (Thai lime) leaves, hence the Lemon Pledge taste. But in a good way. Just like bay leaves, they are there to lend flavor and not meant to be eaten.

Finally it was time for the train to pass through so we made our way out into the market and picked a tiny storefront to pop into to safely witness the event. A few minutes before it was scheduled, we watched all the vendors prepare for its passage. It was much more crowded now than before lunch since large tour groups tended to show up just before the trains came through to watch. Finally we saw the train and it made its way slowly through the tight alley, the passengers on board reaching out to high-five the people in the market below. As soon as it had passed, the vendors went about reconstructing their storefronts.

We now needed to get to the Amphawa Floating Market and decided that now was the time and place to take a tuktuk ride. We found a cluster of tuktuk drivers and Scott haggled with one to get us a reasonable price for the seven kilometer trek. We climbed into the back and off we went. I took a timelapse video of it to record the experience for posterity. Of all the taxi rides we took, it was not the most hair-raising and we arrived alive and ready to see the next market.

Floating markets are a uniquely Southeast Asian feature and harken back to when boats were a part of daily life. Now they are geared mostly to tourists but they’re still interesting to see. We were starting to get our first sense though that if you’ve seen one Thai market, you’ve seen them all, but the location along the river and all the resulting boat traffic made this one quite unique. Here, the street food was cooked on boats in the river, rather than on the street, and we saw vendors in boats with woks, sitting and cooking inside their little vessels.

As we were wandering through the elevated platform and storefronts along the river, we saw a local man hawking what appeared to be a boat ride. With a selfie stick, he whacked a poster depicting various points of interest that were too grainy to decipher, and held his hand out demanding 50 baht (less than $1.50), and much like excited Labradors being offered a car ride, we eagerly handed him the money and climbed aboard the boat with only a rather vague sense of what we had signed up for. But it was a boat ride, and we love boat rides, so life was good.

He continued hawking the tour(?) (was it a tour we had signed up for?) until he and the boat driver decided that the boat was suitably full, and we were instructed to put on life vests, and off we went. We went along the Maeklong river for a bit and we enjoyed seeing the riverfront houses. He then pulled up alongside a dock and he barked something in Thai and pointed at a wat (remember what a wat is?) that sat along the edge of the river and indicated we should all get out. We disembarked and went over to the wat to check it out. This one looked mighty similar to the ones we had seen thus far, and after a cursory investigation, we made our way back to the boat so we wouldn’t be left since we hadn’t the slightest clue when he had told us to be back. As we were waiting to board, I jokingly said to Scott that this was the first of the 10 wats on the tour, since I had no clue what sort of tour we were on.

Well, I’ll be darned. We quickly discovered that we had indeed signed ourselves up for a 5-9 temple tour. We groaned under our breath when we discovered what the boat ride actually was, much like dogs who were initially excited about a car ride, only to discover that they were now headed to the vet.

But we were captive, so tour the wats we did, diligently getting out at each one and poking around before hustling back to the boat. Each seemed to have some unique schtick. My personal favorite was the one that was part temple, part Koi farm. Scott’s favorite was the temple encapsulated by a looming Banyan tree, located on the grounds of some sort of bizarre junkyard collection of lifesize animal figurines, lifesize soldiers, concrete and plaster dinosaurs in various states of disrepair, WW2 era US planes, and a monastery-run petting zoo with the most ill kept and emaciated looking animals I’ve ever seen in my whole life. (You can imagine how the rest of the boat ride went after I saw that.)

We rejoiced when we seemed to be making our way back to the market and we were deposited back at the Amphawa dock, not quite as excited about the boat ride as we had been a few hours previously. It was time for another coconut smoothie before we began the process of finding a Bolt or Grab driver willing to make the 1.5 hour trek from Maeklong back to Bangkok. It took us a while, and I was just starting to get nervous that we would be stuck here, when a driver accepted the trip and showed up a few minutes later. We had an uneventful ride home and were happy to see our little Sakura Sky Residences waiting for us a little while later.