Trish was able to climb out of bed on the last day in Bangkok and was brave enough to get on a boat. When I say she was brave enough it was because her stomach had been under great distress and she hadn’t moved far from a bathroom in days. Little did I know that we were all braver, or ignorant, than I had realized.
Bangkok is a city whose life is built on and around water. There are water taxi’s on its canals, which we took to the medical museum earlier in the trip. Long tail boats get their name from the long propeller shaft that sticks out from their open engines that proved the locomotion through the water. The boats are long and narrow, and are used for sightseeing the cities canals. As any self respecting tourist, we booked a two hour sight seeing tour.
The boats captain as soon as we climbed in was anxiously reseating us to keep things balanced. Narrow and stable rarely go hand in hand, and keeping the weight distributed properly was of grave importance. Since I had seen these boats skittering around the water I didn’t think we were going to be dictated seats, and had to be certain not too move too far from our center.
Pulling away from the dock we had our next surprise. The river didn't look that choppy, until you got onto it. As the boat lurched about, slapping the water, and feeling unstable enough that we were certain not to stray from the center of our seats, we laughed, and looked at each other nervously.
Trish recounted that she had read that on any good trip you should say at least once, “What have I gotten myself into!” Since the shores weren’t too far away, we knew would could swim. I pondered what were the odds of doing it one handed while holding my camera over my head and out of the water. Little did we know this would only be the first, of many times would we say “What have I gotten myself into” on this trip.
We hadn’t gone far when we began to notice small low boats on the water filled with odds and ends. As our boat slowed down one of these boats paddled on over to us and we got a closer look. A smiling, older lady, bursting with good tidings was offering us sodas, beer, and assorted souvenirs for our buying pleasure. Who knew we would be getting a sales pitch on the water way? Turns out, from her broken English, hand signals and laughter it seems to be customary to buy the driver of the boat a beer, which we did. Who is one to argue with custom? Since I didn’t want him to drink alone, and Trish wasn’t feeling well enough I bought a beer for myself as well. Cassidy was gifted with a keychain from her of an elephant.
We were off again, watching the shoreline with its ever changing scenes, but not for long. Soon we pulled to the side and waited for a lock to fill up. Ugh. We had stopped already for gas that didn’t pan out. We stopped for the floating shop. Now we stopped for a lock, and it was taking a bit of time. This delay was important to note because when we finally got through the lock, we didn’t go far until we stopped again!
Ugh, it has been stop and go, and it was a little frustrating now. Where we stopped was a deserted looking restaurant, resort, with a temple there. A man came out and asked us to join come out of the boat and explore since our boat driver was going somewhere. This again being explained in very sparse English, and hand signals. After the long wait at the lock, and there other two stops we were beginning to feel a bit frustrated. We also didn’t want to have a hard sell for anything that this guy might have. Also, where the heck was our boat captain going?
Turns out the boat captain had a big jug with him and was going to get some diesel. OK, that is very important, but we were steadfastly not moving from our seats because we just felt there was going to be a sales pitch for food, or drink or souvenirs or something else we didn’t want.
We sat in the boat being a bit irked, as we had spent more time stopped it seemed then boating along. The man from the resort came out and started tossing what appeared to be birdseed in the water, and the water explored with catfish!
The man with the seed also started feeding pigeons. Cassidy had gotten out of the boat to get closer to the pigeons as his attention was now on the birds and not the fish. A short time later the captain returned with his jug of diesel. He filled her up and started back on the canal tour.
The rest of the trip went smoothly, in the sense of not having any undue surprises or stops, other than one more lock to go through, but it was not smooth in the sense of not being bouncy and tossed around. Nonetheless, when we climbed off the boat we were still chuckling and smiling!