January 10, 2022
We were a bit late starting out, but it’s hard to get going too early when we still haven’t got our circadian rhythm synced with the local clocks. Plus, Gary woke up at 1:30 am and called down to the bellmen to see if our luggage had arrived. We’d heard from the airport late in the afternoon to confirm our hotel and room info as they said the luggage was on the night flight to Bangkok. It had arrived and the bellman delivered it to our room within minutes! Gary double checked it was our luggage and then came back to bed. He found it easier to sleep knowing that our shorts and t-shirts had arrived.
After a tropical fruit breakfast of passion fruit, dragon fruit, banana and mango we took a Grab to the Wat Kanlayanamit Woramahawihan temple. It cost us ฿278 about $10.50 CAD and took 30 minutes. It’s less than 12 km, this an average of 6 km per hour. The traffic was heavy and slow.
We toured around the temple, it had a large golden Buddha.
There was a large bell that you could ring. The religious belief is that you think about where you want your life to go and then ring the bell three times. No, we didn’t ring the bell.
When we were done at the temple, we walked along The Chao Phraya River. Our hope was to get to the other side by a ferry or small boat, but there was nothing available at the time. We walked along further and found the Santa Cruz Catholic Church. We took some photos outside but the building was not open to see inside.
We walked down a street we thought would take us to the bridge to cross the river. We wanted to take the MTR subway back to our hotel. We got stopped by a tuk tuk driver that wanted a fare, we ended up taking the tuk tuk to the Itsaraphap MTR station. The Itsaraphap MTR station is on the west side of the river, it was probably farther than the station we were walking towards but we didn’t need to use the bridge. We made a deal for ฿80 for the ride. When we got the the MTR the driver asked for ฿100, Gary said ฿80 and the driver suddenly realized he was caught in his own lie. We paid him the ฿80 and headed down at least 3 escalators to the subway. It was a long way down as the subway goes under the river. We had no idea how to buy tickets, this was our first time on the Bangkok MTR. One of the employees helped us buy the tickets and showed us how to do it, albeit so fast we could hardly follow what he was doing! He kept the touchscreen set to Thai which made it even harder to follow. We did catch the main points though. It was ฿35 each, pretty reasonable. They do covid screening, a temperature scan and hand sanitizer, before you use your token to get through the turnstiles. We rode the MTR and got off at the tenth stop which was Sukhumvit. The MTR was busy but not packed, we did notice about 1/3 of the riders wearing double masks. The next day we would do the same while on the MTR, just to be careful.
Once back at the hotel we checked out the pool area which we have not used yet. Its very nice and wasn’t too busy.
We walked to the Cali-Mex restaurant about 15 minutes away following Google maps. We sat outside to eat. The restaurant had lots of empty tables inside. The service was slow, the food was average, the beer was cold and ฿99 per bottle about $3.75 CAD. We spent more on beer than food!
On our walk back to the hotel there were street vendors along the sidewalk selling everything from fruit to viagra and sex toys. We did buy some strawberries and a bag of huge passion fruit. Passion fruit as big as large naval oranges! Since we are writing this the next day, we can tell you bigger isn’t better when it comes to passion fruit. The little ones are sweeter and more tasty!
Since we did get our suitcases, we are on top of the world now. Our bottle of melatonin was packed in our luggage and we really missed it the first night. It really helps with the jet lag if you take it before bedtime. It was a good night.
Check out the hotel we are staying in. We usually don’t stay this upscale but this time we did because it is an SHA Plus hotel ensuring covid safety.
