Upon arrival in Bangkok after the 11-hour flight from Amsterdam, what’s the best thing to do? Eat, of course.
And introduce ourselves to this huge city.
Step one: A dinner cruise on the Chao Phraya River. We chose a cruise boat with a good reputation for both food and atmosphere: Manohra cruises.
The Chao Phraya River is the major river of Thailand. Quite a few smaller rivers whose sources lie in the north of the country combine to create the Chao Phraya about 200 km north of Bangkok. It defines the heart of the city before finishing its flow in the Gulf of Thailand.
King Rama I established Bangkok in 1782 as the capital city of Siam (present-day Thailand) on the eastern bank of the Chao Phraya River. We were surprised that Bangkok dates back “only” to the late 1700s; it’s not quite as ancient as we expected. This fact was the first hint that the history of Thailand’s Kingdoms and rulers is a bit complicated.
But there’s time for that later. We’re fresh off the plane, surely facing a few days of jet lag, so let’s just take in the view and enjoy our first Thai dinner.
A few of the nighttime river sights:
A rather elegant dinner:
For our second day in Bangkok, before we joined our 12-day Intrepid excursion, we arranged a midday food tour.
Our host was charming Araya. She’s a Thai woman of entrepreneurial spirit and obvious passion for her country’s cuisine. She’d lived for a few years in Germany so had some insights into European palates.
The heart of our tour was a wander through Or Tor Kor market in the Chatuchak district of Bangkok. This market has been recognized internationally as exceptionally well-run and clean. It is especially known for its fresh fruits, vegetables, meats and seafood.
We loved Araya’s approach. She led us on a meander among the vendor stalls, and then she concocted a food-market meal from what interested us most.
She started with local tropical fruits. She introduced us to mangosteen, which we really liked. The fluffy white fruit has a light flavor reminiscent of lychee.
Then on to Southeast Asia’s most notorious fruit: durian. As we mentioned in our post about our visit to Singapore, durian can have an aggressively pungent smell; so much so that “no durian” signs are commonplace in public places in Bangkok as well as in Singapore. But we’d never experienced this infamous aroma. Piles of whole durian were for sale in the Or Tor Kor market, as well as prepared portions.
You can see how eager the smiling vendor was for us to try the fruit.
It turns out that there are many varieties of durian, only some of which stink. We tried a fresh just-mature sample that didn’t have much of a smell at all. Its consistency was like a frothy goat cheese. The taste was lightly sweet. But, there, lingering in the background, was a distant hint of sewer!
Much later in our time in Bangkok, we went shopping in a shiny very modern mall for Thai spices to bring home with us. Whole durian fruit was on sale in the supermarket there. It seems that someone had opened one stinky durian in the store. The putrid rotten sewer smell spread all over the supermarket and into the mall. What struck us the most was just how much the smell traveled. This must be why durian is forbidden on airplanes, trains, and other public places. Once you let some loose, you have to live with it for quite a while.
Now we know!
These little “plangoes” were much friendlier. They’re called “plango” because they belong to the same family as mangoes, they are the same color and shape as mangoes, and they’re typically the size of plums. Plum + Mango = Plango. They’re seasonal, so we were lucky to be in Bangkok when they were available. Nice gentle mango-like flavor, though a bit denser and more tart.
We visited spreads of sweet confections and lots and lots of curries.
Finally, Araya made us choose a few foods from our tour. Choose! Not easy. With her guidance, we made our list, and she headed back into the stalls to gather the dishes.
Shrimp Pad Thai – While Westerners know Pad Thai because it’s always on the menu in Thai restaurants, originally, it was a food promoted in times of difficulty. It was invented in the 1930s by the Prime Minister at the time; he sought to create a national dish that would promote Thai identity and unity. During World War II, Thailand faced a rice shortage due to the war and flooding. The government promoted rice noodles to reduce domestic consumption of full-grain rice. Also, rice noodles have a longer shelf life than unprocessed rice. During the hard times, people added whatever vegetables and herbs that they could find. Often, the only protein available was egg. In more prosperous times, other proteins were added: seafood, chicken, pork. The classic way to serve Pad Thai is wrapped in a thin egg omelet, which recalls the tight times. Araya told us that good Pad Thai reveals its flavors over time: either sour followed by sweet, or the opposite. She said sadly the Pad Thai that she’d had in Europe was just sweet followed by sweet: no complexity!
Leaf-wrapped Tidbits – Araya told us, and the message was reinforced many times during our visit to Thailand, that Thai people tend to eat “snacks” all through the day. “Snacks” really means little bits of food. This snack of a folded bit of betel nut leaf around a delicious center is a particularly nice example. It looks so simple, but the collection of tastes and textures inside shows perfectly a characteristic of Thai food that we had not realized before: time is a dimension in this cuisine. The best Pad Thai starts sour and then, a few seconds later, evolves to sweet. This little packet of peanuts, chilies, onions, garlic and quite a few spices seemed to have four or five taste phases. You bite, you get a first zing of flavor, you wait a moment, a new crunchy taste emerges, you wait again… Like a little theater in your mouth!
Green Papaya Salad – This is a staple of Thai menus. It always looks the most innocent, but beware, it often packs the biggest chili punch of the meal.
Pork Paneag Curry with Rice
Pork Satay – the usual satay is with chicken, but the pork version is just as yummy.
Crispy Red Ruby in Coconut Milk Syrup – this is a festive classic Thai dessert, served cold, and particularly popular on hot days. The “rubies” are bits of water chestnuts soaked in grenadine, and then boiled in tapioca flour.
Our first two activities introduced us to real Thai food. We — no surprise — enjoyed quite a lot more Thai food during out time in Thailand. All in the spirit of research, of course.
Some views from the Chao Praya River during the daytime. Bangkok’s mass transit options include different types of boats on the river and the canals. Some of the boats operate a bit like Venice’s vaporetti.
There’s also a blue boat that is aimed at tourists like us; it’s a hop-on-hop-off water bus. On our last day in the city, we hopped on and off, we enjoyed a bright clear day to see the city.
Views of the Bangkok skyline
We had seen one of the most prominent cultural monuments on Bangkok’s skyline is Wat Arun, or the Temple of Dawn on our first-night dinner cruise. Now we had the opportunity to visit in daylight.
This is really a complex of something like fifteen buildings in various styles. But the center and most prominent is the central prang (tower or stupa) and four smaller satellite prangs. This arrangement and form of stacked levels that culminate in a corn-cob tower come from Khmer tradition — like Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
Over the years since the beginning of the current Chakri dynasty, these prangs have been enlarged, revised and restored a number of times. Everything is decorated with shells of tropical sea snails and pieces of porcelain, which were previously used as ballast by trading Chinese sailing junks.
The size and prominence of this temple complex comes from politically-motivated religious fervor. Thailand’s kings Rama II and Rama III in the 19th century enlarged and heightened the towers, broadcasting the power and importance of the Thai nation and their dynasty.
The five prangs are technically stupas, although, unlike typical stupas, they don’t have any relics or sacred objects inside them. But the exterior shows us a dizzying composition of stories and symbols — none of which we understand!
What did impress and perplex us is the complicated mixture of Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese and animist content in this Buddhist temple monument. The name of the temple, or wat, is Wat Arun, named after the Hindu god of the dawn. Sculptures and decorations show us pot-bellied dwarves, heavenly musicians, the wind god who serves under Indra, the king of the gods. There are devas (benign Hindu divinities) and lion avatars of Vishnu. Levels of the tower symbolize three realms of Hindu-Buddhist cosmology. There are armies, kings, and Nāgas (great water serpents). You’ve even confronted by Chinese guardian statues.
And this is a Buddhist temple?
It’s all much more complicated than we ever knew. We get a glimpse into the flow and weaving of history in Thailand and south Asia in general in this one monument.
January 2025