Wayne’s Birthday in Bangkok’s Chinatown!

Hello, everyone! Hope your autumn-into-winter season is changing sweetly, if it changes where you are, and that everything is beautiful in your lives! We’re enjoying our time in Bangkok but we’re also looking forward to our upcoming move as we travel north in Thailand.

Table of Contents

• Our Bangkok Apartment
• Getting Around Bangkok
• Stuff We Didn’t Buy
• Wayne’s Birthday!
• Bangkok’s Chinatown
• Vegan Eats!
• The Asiatique
• Wat Traimit
• Lumphini Park
• Conclusion

Our Bangkok Apartment

As you may know, as we travel we book a hotel or apartment online first. This gives us a spot to stay while we look around the neighbourhoods for a more long-term apartment. This time, we booked our first apartment in a hotel without visiting, and it turned out to be in a very, very Thai part of town. We’ve only seen one other farang (white person) in this area, and neither of us can remember the last time we actually spoke with another farang face-to-face! Sort of funny to say it, because we didn’t realize it until I was writing this post.

We’re staying in the SPB Paradise Hotel in a studio apartment on the 7th floor. It’s a nice enough spot, large and bright and clean, and we love the lay-out, which is fairly common here. The bath is to one side of the entrance and a closet on the other side. There’s a long wall with a desk, bed on the opposite wall, and a small balcony with a clothes rack. This place also has a comfy couch we’re using a fair bit, which is nice!

The view’s not much to write home about, but it’s been interesting to watch the construction next door. So much manual labour here! Every tile for the driveway placed by hand, then sanded, then grouted; the cement mixed by hand in a large tub with a hoe. Dirt moved by shovel and wheelbarrow.

Getting Around Bangkok

We tried to get a place close to the Vegetarian Community because their food is incredibly good and crazy cheap! Unfortunately, we couldn’t get within easy walking distance. Bangkok (or, at least, this part of Bangkok) is not designed for pedestrians. There are usually sidewalks, but the traffic is bad (can’t imagine what it was like pre-covid). There are many lanes, so a lot of overpasses for main streets. And, honestly, the walking here just isn’t enjoyable. There’s a lot of traffic, a lot of big buildings, but nothing that stirs us.

There is a local market quite close to us that we wander through pretty much daily. Also, we found a nearby night market that sets up on Saturday night. But alas, no vegan food (except fruit!).

Really, to get anywhere from our hotel, you have to ride. And we don’t like always using the taxis because they add up in cost, of course. So we’ve taken to using the subway!

It’s called the MRT, and we’re incredibly lucky that it’s so close – less than a 10-minute walk. The first time we used it was hilarious…I messed up trying to get through the gate and it wouldn’t open. It took 2 non-english-speaking Thai to figure it out…we were all cracking up laughing by the time I got through! Then, when we arrived at our stop, *that* gate refused to accept my token. A local Thai tried to help me but couldn’t, so she got assistance and they had to manually let me through. I was almost trapped in the MRT!

But we’ve used it a few times since that, and now we’re pros…I’m sure we fit right in 😉

Here’s a couple of random photos from some of our walks around Bangkok.

Stuff We Didn’t Buy

We’ve been to the JJ Mall, a nearby mall. It’s sort of high-end (mom would love it!) with lots and lots of decor stuff. And life-sized eerily-lifelike monk replicas, if you needed to have one in your home. You too could own a monk! There’s also a really good veg restaurant upstairs.

There are also so, so many tremendously large, framed paintings and prints. And they are gorgeous! I fell in love with this one.

The mall is near to the Chatuchak market and the Vegetarian Society, so yay for that! We came across an outdoor market one day, it looked sort of like the yard sales back home (except with a distinct Asian influence of course). The detail and ornamentation of just about everything you see here is just extraordinary.

Wayne’s Birthday!

Wayne’s birthday was on December 9..he’s 56 now!!!! But still gorgeous 🙂 We started the day with carrot cake, of course!

Then we got dressed for the day!

Bangkok’s Chinatown

To celebrate Wayne’s birthday, we decided to spend the day and night in Chinatown. Bangkok’s Chinatown is apparently one of the biggest Chinatowns in the world (according to Google, and who argues with Google?!) and it’s certainly vibrant.

To get to Chinatown, we took the subway to the nearest pier on the Chao Phraya, also known as the River of Kings. We had to wait a bit for the taxi. Here’s the birthday boy waiting at the pier!

From there we took one of the many water taxis to the Chinatown Pier.

We took lots of photos on the way. It was over an hour on the boat, but we never got bored! I loved seeing the birds sitting on the branches that floated in the river, and we passed so many temples, and different types of boats.

Then we walked to our hotel. We can’t believe how different the vibe in Chinatown is from the other areas of Bangkok we’ve been in! Also, maybe it was just the weather, but the two days we spent in Chinatown were the warmest with the most humidity of any we’ve spent since Phuket.

Aside from the fantastic, crazy road and pedestrian traffic, there are brilliantly coloured signs everywhere, a multitude of street vendors, and there seem to be food markets on every second corner. There are warrens of alleys of shops that you can easily get lost in. Thank god for google maps!

We easily found our hotel, La Locanda. It’s a small boarding house type place run by a couple of Italians; they’re so sweet and welcoming, and their cats are adorable! We had a cute, tiny room with a private bathroom.

They cooked us a pizza for supper (a Real Italian Pizza, people! Ultra-thin-crust) that was so very, very yummy.

For breakfast the next day they cooked us a special surprise: vegan apple cake! (Along with loads of fruit and homemade bread and homemade jam). So good!!!

Vegan Eats!

La Locanda is located within easy walking distance to pretty much everywhere we wanted to go…the Sampheng Market, Old Market, Wat Traimit, the China Mall (where the So Vegan restaurant is located), and Jae Lee Vegetarian Restaurant.

Of course, one of the first places we visited was the Jae Lee Vegetarian, and it was so worth it…we ended up returning, surprise! It’s located in an alley, and it’s really an outdoor vendor with a long table set up across from the stand. The prices were unbelievable and the food…well, we haven’t had Chinese fried rice in literally years, and this is the best we’ve ever had.

And, lucky us, there was a tiny ice cream shop, the Jing Jing, tucked in right beside the Jae Lee that had vegan sorbets and ice cream! We each had a Brown Sugar Coconut Ice Cream. A little pricier, but so, so good. Mmmmm, ice cream.

The Asiatique

For Wayne’s birthday evening, we took a water taxi to Central Pier (Sathorn), then grabbed one of the free water shuttles to Asiatique Sky! I was dying to take Wayne on the 200-foot ferris wheel over the Chao Phraya. We didn’t find it nearly as exciting as we thought we would, because we were enclosed in gondolas with windows….no airflow, so even though we were moving we didn’t really feel it. Nice view though, but probably not worth the price if you wanted any thrill.

The carousel was a different story! Okay, maybe not exactly thrilling, per se, but I’ve always loved carousels with a passion, and I didn’t know there was one at the Asiatique! So we both got on, and it was lovely 🙂 And yes, we were the oldest riders.

By then we were both hungry and I was developing a good headache, so we took the shuttle back to Central Pier. Bangkok at night from the water is absolutely gorgeous.

From there, instead of taking a grab taxi, Wayne got us a tuk-tuk. Even with my headache, it was an exciting ride (definitely more thrilling than the ferris wheel, the way they drive!)

I’d planned on us going out again, but we were both pretty beat so we went to bed instead.

Wat Traimit

The next morning we visited Wat Traimit, the temple of the Golden Buddha. Now, we’ve both seen enough temples recently that we hadn’t planned on visiting another so soon, but when I read about this one, we had to!

It houses the world’s largest solid gold Buddha image!

Before you see the Buddha pics, here are some random temple photos.

Some of the ornamental statues and guardians surrounding the Buddha are very intricately hand-woven, they’re honestly works of art. I hope these photos show some of the detail.

Back to the Buddha…

The statue is 5.5 tonnes of solid gold, but the gold was hidden for hundreds of years under a plaster cover when Thailand was being invaded, and of course, everyone forgot about it. (HOW, I ask? HOW did everyone forget this?) Everyone assumed it was just a really, really heavy plaster buddha until one day when they were moving it, it fell and a piece of plaster broke off to reveal the gold.

Coincidentally, they also discovered that it was molded in 5 sections, and fits together with a key, so it’s much easier to move now!

Anyway, now it’s a really important buddha image and everyone comes from everywhere to see it. And honestly, it is really impressive.

Lumphini Park

After visiting Wat Traimit we checked out of La Locanda and went for a last lunch at Jae Lee, then caught the Metro to Lumphini Park. I wanted to surprise Wayne with these guys:

They’re water monitors, they’re magnificent and just, wow, really. Never having seen anything nearly like this in our lives, we were impressed. And there were a lot of them around. Most of the ones we saw were around 5 feet long!

There were also sleepy kitties everywhere, and so many birds!

This beautiful, elegant creature flew up to us and walked right between us into the water, where he strode along a wall in the water, fishing. Some of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken.

The park itself was beautiful, too! Beautifully landscaped, paths and ponds everywhere. We especially liked these trees growing in a small pond.

There were quite a few of these extraordinarily large trees, the photos don’t really do them justice, but I tried. They’re called Rain Trees, or Cow Tamarinds, and they’re very tall with an enormous, umbrella-like canopy that spreads out quite a distance. Stunning!

And some random park photos, including the birthday boy 🙂

After all this we taxied home for a very-much-needed nap.

Conclusion

So, Wayne’s birthday celebrations/explorations were on the 9th & 10th. We left for Chiang Mai on the 13th by train and arrived in the morning. We’re (and by that I mean *I’m*) behind on our posts, but just so you know, Chiang Mai is gorgeous and we absolutely love it here!

But we did manage to get a sunset photo from our balcony before we left Bangkok! Enjoy 🙂