Inside one of Thailand’s biggest attractions
BY ALAIN CHARTRAND
I only had a few hours left in Bangkok and wanted to see as much as possible. My first stop was the Grand Palace Museum. To enter the grounds you must be wearing closed shoes, pants, no tank tops or any revealing clothing. In weather over 40 degrees Celsius, it was a bit of a pain, but I turned my shorts into pants and went in to check out the grounds anyway.
The terrace was made of metal and the sun was relentless. We weren’t wearing any shoes or socks so I was running to the shadowed parts to save my skin. I swear if I had a piece of meat I could cook it on that roof. After that Morgan and I parted ways and I headed to the airport. Talk about maximizing your time.
There was a little building where you could deposit your driver’s license or whatever in exchange for some used clothing; pants, sweaters and shoes to cover up any visible skin but luckily I was set. Part of the museum is where the King and Queen used to live which is why it’s so ‘grand.’
Upon entering, there was a little army of soldiers with roughly 60 M-16′s all racked up. There was a machine gun and an ammunition belt, a huge pile of shells on the floor along with about 30 visible soldiers in the front room.
Before leaving the grounds, I met a guy from Vancouver named Morgan. We got to talking and decided to go see the Big Buddha together, which was to be my next stop anyway. It took a while to find a ‘tuk-tuk’ (a small three-wheeled taxi) that would take us where we wanted to go, probably because I had been scammed before made sure to let them know if they tried to fool us we wouldn’t pay. Morgan had been scammed before, in a way I had never heard of.
As he was walking down the sidewalk on the way to a museum, an old lady put some bird seeds in his hand and motioned for him to throw it up in the air. He did so and the birds, mostly pigeons, flocked to the scene. She again gave him more seeds. I’m not sure how many times this was repeated, but when he was leaving she made a scene wanting money for the seeds. He refused to pay. While looking for the tourist police, some big guy showed up. Not wanting any more confrontation, he gave her some change from his pocket and left.
There are so many people ripping off tourists (at least in Bangkok) that they need special police. According to the Lonely Planet Guide book they don’t do very much to help you. There are all kinds of scams, silk scams, gems scams and a lot of smaller ones like the seed situation. Bad tour guides bring you to the wrong place, the list goes on but I digress.
After seeing the Big Buddha, we grabbed a cab to the mountain, where we were told there was a good view of the city. When we got there we saw that it wasn’t actually a mountain, but a man-made structure. It was a huge building that took three king’s reigns to build. It was a big monument to Buddha with a little shrine on the top. We hiked our way to the top where we indeed had a good view of the city. We had to take our shoes off before going into the structure. It was similar to the CN Tower in Toronto or the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Taiwan, the way you could walk all the way around to see the city from all sides. In the middle was the shrine where people could pray. We went onto the roof where there were magnified looking glasses like binoculars that allowed you to zoom in, for a fee of course.
Alain Chartrand is currently teaching English in China. He frequently writes articles for The Weekly Wanderer.
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