The hostel was organizing a trip to the Amphawa floating
market outside of Bangkok today, so I decided to join. There were about 25
travellers from the hostel who went, so it was quite popular! We walked to a
minivan station near the Victory Monument and caught a van for the 1-1.5 hour
ride. My van was slightly larger than a supershuttle, but there were 17 people
in it (4 people per row)! It was not the best organized trip, so after we were
dropped off at the bus station near the market, we had to wait for about an
hour until the guide from the hostel came to meet us. Eventually, we walked to
the market and had some time to explore and eat lunch. There were many stalls,
the unique thing about the floating market being that the market bordered a
canal, and some of the stalls pulled up on boats. At these stalls, they would
cook food on the boat, and then either hand it ashore in a basket or have a guy
who would wade out to get it. Their specialty was seafood.
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| Floating market |
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| More floating market |
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| Lunch! |
After lunch, we got
onto a long tail boat and road down the canal out to a larger river. We spent a
couple hours motoring down this river and stopping at three Buddhist temples on
the way. In particular, we stopped at one that is one of the oldest in the
region (older than any of the temples in Bangkok), it was a relatively small
stone building, but it had many trees growing on/around it, so it looked like
part of an enormous tree.
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| Riverside house |
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| Buddha statue in one of the temples |
After we finished going to the temples, we had a bit
more time at the market, and then we caught the van back to the hostel. While I
would have liked a little more time seeing the market and a little less time
waiting during the day, it was fun to meet travellers from many different
countries on the trip.
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