Day 5: Grand Palace & Wat Arun

Today was a day for a couple of the top attractions in Bangkok, ones you’ll find in every guidebook and web site. The Grand Palace and Wat Arun.

That was the plan anyway.

Royal Grand Palace

Visiting the Royal Grand Palace seems like a good idea: it’s after all the seat of power in the kingdom. The reality is quickly revealed:

Tourists are to be expected, but the pulsing masses here were truly impressive. It’s high season, and the foreigners are all over it. I find these kinds of crowds harder to take than the crowds at say the Floating Market. Maybe it’s because with those crowds I feel the people are engaged in the experience; it’s a market and they — for the most part — are buying. Even the tourists are buying.

At the Grand Palace its a different feeling. Everyone’s just there to observe. Even so I was going to go and take a look. After all, it’s in all the guidebooks.

Then I saw the price: ฿500. That’s $15, which is a big chunk of the daily budget. Is that what I want to spend it on?

As it turns out, it is not. So instead we talked the perimeter taking some pictures and headed to lunch near the river to regroup.

Wat Arun

Wat Arun (the Temple of Dawn) is on the opposite side of the Chao Phraya river. Its main spire (or prang) is visible and imposing from across the river. Were we able to get up early, legends say we’d see the sun gleaming off it. The ferry across is a tiny ฿3.

It looks attractive and we go. The fees are much friendlier: ฿50. Better yet, the main building is a pyramid with outside steps, like Mayan or Aztec temples. It’s very steep, but you can get some exercise and climb.

Climb we did. It was much less intimidating than we feared: the hand rails feel incredibly solid and there was hardly any fear, even while descending. The views were great. And the grounds outside were incredibly peaceful and included a coffee shop where we met a retired Canadian couple. They were great to talk with and have traveled extensively. Their tip? Croatia. A national park with a thousand waterfalls. And the Amalfi coast.

So the grand palace was a miss but Wat Arun more than made up for it. Despite making us late, which cascaded into missing the free yoga and ultimately arriving too late to the hotel rooftop swimming pool. It closed at 8. Not our hotel of course, but the hostel folks had found that if you just show up there, act like you belong, you can swim and no one will challenge you. Shh. Don’t tell anyone and ruin it for us all.