Thais and their Tuk-tuks

The locals are friendly. A smile seems to go a long way and the Thais are persistent but not overly pushy salespeople. They seem to have a great sense of humour and are generally polite and deferential to others. An older woman gave me her seat on the boat on the very last trip and insisted that I sit in it. The exception was the harried attendant on our boat, whom we have twice encountered, who seemed exasperated by life and not filled with the joys of job satisfaction. Regardless, one of our enduring memories of Bangkok will be the shaking of the coin holder that the boat conductors use to sell tickets, along with our lady’s cries of, “INSIDE!” and the whistling of instructions to the driver as the boats stop at each pier.

 

Wat Arun lies just across the river from Wat Pho. We should have taken the cross-river ferry there from pier 8, at Wat Pho, but we made a mistake and hopped on the ferry one stop too soon so we found ourselves on the trickier side of the river for transport, with no hope of walking all the way to the temple. In an uncharacteristically efficient manner, I hailed a taxi and we jumped in to discover ourselves with a small problem in the sense that the driver could not understand our atonal intonation of “Wat Arun”. Tallulah was quick-thinking and showed him the map in the guidebook, only to realise later that as it was annotated in English it probably wouldn’t help much. He thought about it for a minute and asked, “Wat Arun?” It was pleasant just to sit in an air-conditioned taxi for the couple of kilometres – or, as it is known in Bangkok, couple of hours.

I exaggerate, but the traffic seems horrendous. As I understand it, locals see public transport as somewhat demeaning, so many people would prefer to sit in their own cars – often very expensive – than be caught dead on the Skytrain. As a result our Skytrain journey was very pleasant and was like riding in a fridge! A very empty fridge where every single passenger got a seat – certainly not something we ever saw happen on the boat.

Our attempts to get back to the hotel from Siam Square were repeated and abortive. We completed a circuit of the Siam Paragon mall trying to find a taxi, to find two in a row who did not know how to get to our hotel, even with the directions card, and one who said, “Oh, it’s very far from here” in a manner which implied that we would never find anyone to take us. Just when I was beginning to imagine that we would have to bed down in the car park, Tallulah suggested grabbing a passing tuk-tuk, and we entirely failed to bargain well in the relief that someone would take us home!

I wouldn’t say we nearly died in that tuk-tuk – it was relatively incident free – but the ride had a quality that had Tallulah having vivid flashes of our inevitable bloody deaths by passing bus and me composing the headlines: nothing as exciting as “Brit beheaded in freak tuk-tuk tragedy” but more along the lines of “Student dies in traffic accident” – mundane. Though Tallulah did suggest that the tabloids might go for something along the lines of “Tut-tut, tuk-tuk.” With a picture of us photoshopped giving the thumbs down. When we were crossing the lobby we admitted that our legs were like jelly.