Five Days in Bangkok

- The fabulous, gold-covered Wat Po and Royal Palace
- Dioramas at the National Museum
- An overview of Thai history and architecture at the Suan Pakkad Palace Museum
- A rocket-boat ride through the canals, past old wooden stilt houses
- A day trip to Ayutthaya, the former capitol of Thailand, now an enormous series of spectacular ruins
- Little temples (housing big crocodiles) in Chinatown

Quick Tips:

Wear modest clothes: no shorts or tank tops allowed in temples. Even if the rules aren't enforced, it's still nice to be polite about it. Your shoes should be easy to slip on and off. Always remove shoes before entering a temple or a private home. Women should be careful not to touch Buddhist monks; if you make physical contact with one, he'll have to confess it and do penance.

Get a massage! The Wat Po massage school is a particularly neat place for this. Drink water before you're thirsty.
Bring a lot of film or an extra memory card. And an umbrella, if you're there in June or July.

Best Way To Get Around:

Bangkok's traffic is ghastly, so it's best to try to get a hotel near some of the main attractions or handy to the skytrain line. Tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws) and taxis abound, but taxi drivers may well refuse to take you to places which are too far away or hard to get to. You're best off concentrating on a single area in any given day, rather than trying to hop quickly between major sights. The skytrain is sleek and quick and pleasant to ride (though probably pretty crowded at times). It goes to or at least near a lot of the places we went. Water buses have regular routes along the canals, and while they don't go as quickly as the skytrain, they're a lot of fun in their own right. Walking is a lot of fun in Chinatown and in the flower markets - the streets are busy and scented with cooking food and jasmine blossoms (with strong undertones of exhaust fumes).

We stayed at the luxurious, beautiful, and amazingly peaceful Chakrabongse Villas. The hotel consists of the outbuildings of a prince's palace (the prince retains the main building as a private residence). The hotel has three private villas - the Riverside Villa, the Thai House, and the Garden Suite - set in lush tropical gardens on the bank of the Chao Phraya in the center of Bangkok. Each of the villas is carefully and luxuriously decorated: the Thai House in traditional Thai style, the Riverside Villa and Garden Suite in more modern taste. My husband and I stayed in the Garden Suite, which is the least fancy of the three, since it lacks a river view - but it's spacious and light, and has cool marble floors, teak furnishings, a firm queen-sized bed, and a super powered air conditioner. The feeling of seclusion and comfort is remarkable, and particularly valuable after a day in a hot, crowded, bustling city.

The Villas' biggest selling point, though, is it's combination of secluded luxury and prime location. There's a swimming pool in the gardens: after a day of sightseeing in 90-degree weather, a quick swim can be as good as a two-hour nap in refreshing you for dinner. The gardens are full of deep pots containing water lilies and goldfish, set beneath blooming frangipani trees. Breakfast (and dinner, if you order ahead) is served in the riverside sala, an open pavilion floating on its own dock. It's a wonderful setting - when we got there, I was waking up at 6am from the jet lag, and I found that the sala made the perfect place to sit and watch the sun come up and the city come to life. For breakfast you have a choice between Western (eggs, bacon, toast, cereal) or Thai (fish, chicken, or pork in rice porridge), and all are good examples of their kind. But the real standout is dinner - I was particularly impressed with an appetizer consisting of a lime leaf which you picked up and wrapped around fried shallots, tiny shrimp, and chopped chilis.

While you're eating, you have a view across the river of Wat Arun, and you can sit for hours watching the boats - ferries full of commuters, big commercial barges, and, after dark, tourist dinner boats, where the food is probably nowhere near as good. When you're done with breakfast, you're a five-minute walk from Wat Po, and only ten minutes from Chinatown. The hotel has Internet access available in the library, where you can also check out their house-published line of books on Thai art, architecture, and history. The fancy suites cost about $190-250 a night, depending which one you reserve and the time of year. But there's also a guesthouse wing to the hotel, in which we spent one night. For $50, you get a much smaller but perfectly comfortable room, and access to all the hotel's amenities.

The Supatra River House is a famous and elegant restaurant, one of Bangkok's Big Deal dinner establishments. It's set on the Chao Priya River, and you get there by boat, which adds to the ambience. You can eat out on the veranda, or inside in an air-conditioned room. If you're lucky, they'll have Thai dancers in full costume while you're there; a troupe of them from the adjacent theater appeared on a boat while we were eating and put on a performance on the dock.

The food is very good--but then, we had no bad food at all in Thailand. The restaurant's specialty is (unsurprisingly) fish, and it offered a variety of preparations, which were different from what we found at other less elegant restaurants, perhaps a bit more Chinese influence at work and more variety in the possible sauces available. We were a large group, and thus were able to sample a wide variety of dishes, and everything met with approval.

In retrospect, however, while the food was delicious, it was not our most memorable meal in Thailand, and it may have been our most expensive. Part of my lack of enthusiasm comes from the fact that I'm a vegetarian, so that I couldn't partake of the house specialties, but the rest of the group, while well satisfied by the food, agreed that the restaurant was good, but not spectacular. The most memorable thing, I think, was the cocktails, which were made with some wonderful tropical juices. The setting of the restaurant is beautiful, and the food is carefully prepared, but if you're on a budget, I'd suggest saving your splurges for another venue. (If you're not on a budget, by all means, go.)

The Suan Pakkad Palace Museum is a collection of six traditional Thai houses full of different sets of objects: musical instruments, finds from an archaeological dig, serving plates, Thai dance masks, and puppets. One house - the loveliest - contains only its own beautiful, intricately lacquered walls: gold on black, scenes of bullock carts fording rivers on one panel, battles between gods and demons on the next: spectacular intricate gold work. The houses are set in lovely, peaceful gardens, and it's very pleasant to stroll through them; for many, you must put your shoes in a little bag to carry them with you through the teak rooms.

We spent a particularly long, happy time in the archaeological section, the only part of the museum housed in a modern hall. The archaeological finds include some particularly beautiful bronze work: ladles with carefully wrought decorative handles adorned with little model animals, for example, dated, frustratingly, "2000-300 BC." This was particularly useful since the museum was one of the few places we found in Thailand which dealt with archeology more than about 800 years old, and certainly the only place that contained information from before the era of the Buddha. Also delightful in this section was a little diorama of the finding of the site: an American sociology student discovered the first ceramic pots by tripping over a log and landing face-down in some potsherds. In the diorama, he's shown in mid-fall, looking very amusingly alarmed.

The puppetry exhibit was contained a large display of fighting puppets clearly intended to move and mechanically reenact a seven-minute section of the Ramayana, but the stage was fitted with a big and permanent-looking OUT OF ORDER sign. Upstairs from the puppets were the dance costumes, complete with thorough explanations of how the masks are constructed. The museum is open daily from 9am to 4pm. Admission includes a souvenir fan made of brightly dyed woven bamboo.

We were almost alone in the museum when we visited. The Suan Pakkad Palace Museum seems to be less visited than the Jim Thompson House, which is a pity: it's a much more thorough picture of Thai history, and every bit as polished and well-presented.

Wat Po is a magnificent temple complex made of dozens of buildings and 99 chedis (that's Thai for stupa: unlike Tibetan stupas, Thai chedis don't necessarily contain ashes; they might also have broken Buddha images in them). The Wat Po chedis are covered with gaudy porcelain mosaics. There are hundreds of Chinese stone statues, from two-foot-tall pigs to 12-foot demons and kings and Westerners in top hats; apparently these were brought back as ballast in trading ships. There is a pavilion full of instructional plaques, made out of marble, on Thai medicine and massage; King Rama II had these put up so that ordinary people could come to the temple and make rubbings of the plaques with rice paper, and thus acquire a medical and massage textbook. There are also statues demonstrating Thai massage techniques.

But the main point of the complex is the temple buildings. Of the many major shrines, two are especially amazing. Most important is the Golden Buddha, a magnificent altar dedicated to one of Thailand's most important Buddha statues, in a building covered by spectacular painted murals depicting the life of the Buddha. But perhaps more surprising to Western visitors is the Reclining Buddha: it's a vast, vast statue, which if it were standing up would be five or six stories tall. The statue is housed in an enormous building, and is visible only in segments because of the necessity of surrounding it with columns to hold up the roof. Particularly beautiful are the statue's feet, which are covered with gold leaf patterns.

All the buildings, though, are spectacular, covered with gold leaf and carving. On a sunny day, the effect is blinding.
Wat Po and the Royal Palace next door are the two main sights of the city, and we saw more tourists there than during the rest of the entire trip combined. So if you're looking for a peaceful afternoon, this isn't the place to go. But it's an unmissable sight. Wat Po also houses one of the country's most respected massage schools. There's a 20 Baht entrance fee (about $0.50).

The walk from our hotel to Chinatown was instant happiness. To get there, we had to go through the flower market; we walked under dripping tarps suspended over the sidewalk to warn off the seasonal rains, past stall after stall of white jasmine garlands, bags of rose petals, chains of chrysanthemums, and scattered among them stalls where women were frying sizzling omelettes or pouring boiling water over noodles. The traffic was thick and very smoky, so we turned down side streets whenever we could, including a passage through a tremendously crowded covered market.

After a while we found our first Wat: a small neighborhood temple, kids riding bikes in the yard. The wat's primary building was a tall red and white chedi, but there was also a grotto containing a depiction of Buddha's shadow: a human shape, about eight feet tall, done on the wall in black paint, and then covered with squares of gold. Next to the shadow was a tremendously cheery-looking statue of a fat saint, who had become fat in order to show the vanity of beauty. And there was a lovely assembly hall, its walls covered with scenes from the life of the Buddha. But probably the most unusual aspect of the wat was its crocodile pond -- a very small pond full of very large crocodiles, and next to it a large glass case containing the remains of the pool's first crocodile.

We kept on through Chinatown, past fish stalls and men peering through jewelers' lenses at amulets, and arrived at another wat -- an entirely different one, with a large tiered formal gateway to its courtyard. As we arrived, an endless stream of young saffron-robed monks was coming out of a doorway and up a nearby staircase; it took three or four minutes for them all to pass. We went into the assembly hall at the back of the enclosure, and there were monks chanting intensely, and laypeople with prayerbooks chanting along, and gold on the red columns, and one sign up in the rafters saying "No Photo"; we hovered as long as we dared, and then just as we turned to go out by the narrow door -- in came the first of the long stream of monks, and we had to wait for them to pass again.

We got massages at the Ruan-Nuad Massage Studio in Bangkok. I'm sorry to say that I don't have their contact info, and they don't seem to have a website; but if you're in Bangkok at a hotel, they might be able to help you find the place, since it seems to be pretty well known. We found it through our tour agent, Smiling Albino (smilingalbino.com).
Thai massage is a very old art form, and it combines several different basic techniques: kneading, pressure, and stretching. The kneading and pressure are much like massages anywhere, but the stretching is somewhat unusual: the masseuse moves your limbs around into positions similar to yoga poses, and then holds them there to make you stretch. Apparently the massages are usually more strenuous in the North - although that wasn't the case in our fairly limited sample set.

When you arrive at the massage studio, you're given a pair of loose pajamas and a pair of flip-flops. (Ruan-Nuad has lockers to keep your clothes in.) You're taken onto a balcony, where your masseuse or masseur (they'll give you a person of your own gender) washes off your feet in warm, slightly scented water. Then they lead you into the massage studio proper, a large upstairs room divided into four clean white cubicles, each with a curtain of white cloth at the front for privacy. It smells like mint essence, and they were playing music - amusingly, very lightly done jazz standards.

The overall experience was simply marvelous, especially soon after the 24-hour flight from New York to Bangkok, when we were stiff and sore from the jet lag as well as the extended sitting. At the end, it felt very much as though three or four days had been added to your life. The massage lasted an hour, including a few minutes of lying relaxing in the cubicle afterwards. At the end, the masseuse brings you a cup of light-tasting lemongrass tea, which is a very pleasant way to return to consciousness after the almost trance-like state you enter during the massage. The hour-long massage cost about $20, plus a tip; they also offer half-hour and two-hour options, priced proportionally.

During the course of our trip to Thailand we had two other Thai massage sessions: one in Chiang Mai, and one at the airport on our way out. The airport experience was quite different, because it was much less private: the studio there was a big room full of leather reclining chairs, in which you sit, with a towel over your eyes, elbow to elbow with the next customer. We used up our last Baht there on an amazing splurge: for $15, you can get a half an hour of simultaneous head massage and foot massage - that's one person massaging each extremity of you. We hesitated about doing this as it seemed somehow... icky, gauche and exploitative, although it's hard to say why it's more exploitative than receiving a massage from one person; but we went ahead and did it, with the result that the first several hours of the plane flight home were downright comfortable. It's a wonderful experience.