Go with the flow
Take the road less travelled in Thailand by touring the country on its rivers that promise adventure, sights and good eats
The boat ride on the Mae Klong River in central Thailand was billed as a firefly cruise, but there was no sign of the blinking bugs a halfhour into our nighttime ride.
We were on a narrow, wooden craft in Samut Songkhram, a small province about an hour southwest of Bangkok with a dozen other tourists in pairs on wooden benches. The engine roared as we ploughed through the glossy, black water. The only lights came from the balconied hotels and elevated pagodas on the shore, and from a temple with a startlingly large and hunched black Buddha, in a golden robe with glinting white eyes.
Then, as we rounded a bend and the skipper cut the engine, we drifted towards a twinkling stand of trees, the spindly limbs seemingly strung with strands of white lights. The fireflies weren’t floating around, but were parked on the branches, flickering in unison. For the next 20 minutes, the boatman steered us from bank to bank, drifting past the silent light shows, the stars so bright it was hard to distinguish their twinkle from the luminescence of the insects.
Thailand may be famous for its tropical isles and aquamarine seas, but select rivers and canals in the country’s core offer opportunities for some astonishing adventures as well.
Several major rivers like the Chao Phraya and the Mae Klong course south into the Gulf of Thailand, with dozens of tributaries and canals connecting along the way.
Perhaps because Thailand’s rivers are not as legendary as, say, the Nile in Egypt, where a significant sector of travel is built around tourist ships, there are only a few companies booking cruises with overnight cabins. Mostly the options are hourlong or half-day trips, so we put together our own tour.
When my wife, Susan, and I arrived in Bangkok, I must admit that my uninformed image was that of a chaotic city rife with red-light districts. There are indeed some seedy strips and at times overwhelming traffic and crowds. But we found a well-organised, vast metropolis, with a calming Buddhist vibe. Snaking through this land of ornate temples with golden Buddhas, soaring condo towers and endless street markets, gleaming malls and mouldy tenements, is one of Thailand’s most important waterways.
Although people have lived along the Chao Phraya and its tributaries for centuries, the river powered Bangkok’s evolution from a small settlement in the 1400s, to the nation’s capital in 1782 and to one of Southeast Asia’s dominant economic centres today.
Triple-hulled barges carrying everything from corn for breakfast cereal and cement for construction are a constant presence, led by straining tugboats. But with Thailand’s international tourism continuing to surge — rising nearly 60 per cent in the past six years to 35.4 million visitors in 2017, more than a quarter from China — the barges are far outnumbered by more than 300 boats catering to tourists.
Ploughing through the wide, brownishgray river from morning to night in central Bangkok are duck-billed ferries, jam-packed water buses, private tour boats and dinner cruise yachts. Slicing through it all are Thailand’s most ubiquitous and distinctive crafts — long-tail boats, like big canoes powered by diesel truck engines with protruding drive shafts tipped with propellers.
We hired one at the pier of the Millennium Hilton, where our room on the 12th floor overlooked the river, and launched into a riotous ride, rising up in 1.2 metre waves and slamming down. The motor screamed like a supersonic jet. The propeller blasted out a fan of white froth.
The boats dock at the city’s most famous temples like Wat Pho, where we entered shoeless into a massive pavilion containing a 46-metre long reclining Buddha and a steady flow of shoulder-toshoulder gawkers.
When Tom Praisan returned to Bangkok a decade ago from Los Angeles, he wasn’t satisfied with the hurried and hectic long-tail rides. So he started Pandan Tour, offering full-day and three-hour canal cruises in Thonburi west of the river.
Many of the canals, or khlongs, “were made since the ancient Khmer Empire and we just took them over and built on the system, and it was the superhighway of the nation,” he said. “We build our houses on stilts to protect from the flood. We fish from the water. We use the water to grow rice. That’s just our way of life, to be close to the water.”
We started on the calm and narrow Khlong Dan, the boat’s Toyota car engine emitting little noise or fumes. The banks were thick with banana and mango trees and towering coconut palms. We passed shack after wooden shack perched on the dark water.
We stopped at Wat Pak Nam, where Buddhist nuns chanted in a hall and we marvelled at a green crystal pagoda several storeys high.
On one of our nights in Bangkok, we caught a water bus on the river for 20 baht (Dh3.40) each to see where it took us. The floodlit hotels with sky bars and the sprawling Disneyesque Grand Palace gave way to darkness on the banks as we headed north.
On another night, instead of choosing among the dinner cruises offering buffets and dancing, we went with Manohra Cruises’ restored rice barge with waiters serving three courses to two dozen candlelit diners. The food — especially the tom yum soup with shrimp and the mango sticky rice — did not disappoint, though the breeze cooled the entrees.
There are several popular floating markets within a two-hour drive north and south of Bangkok.
After our firefly cruise from the Amphawa Floating Market in Samut Songkhram, we shuffled through the throngs of international tourists past stalls loaded with Tshirts, coconuts, dried fish, Thai boxing shorts, fried quail eggs. We perched on concrete steps leading to three boats on the canal, where a woman grilled large prawns on a fire in a metal box in a boat and a man in the prow mixed papaya salad in a wooden bowl with a pestle.
We stayed a mile upstream at a sevenroom guesthouse tucked in the trees along a muddy bank. Simon Sriganta, a 28-year-old entrepreneur, built the River Jam with an open-air dining room and Singer sewing machine stands for tables. He opted for seclusion over a site on the broad Mae Klong.
“It feels so relaxing when we sleep,” he said. “This size is OK, you can see everything, you can look to the coconut tree.”
One thing worth seeing is back in Samut Songkhram at the Maeklong Railway Market. Eight times a day, tourists with cameras and smartphones pack a railroad crossing that has a train depot on one side of the road and what looks like a permanent market on the other. Awnings and big umbrellas stretch 100 yards along the line. Every couple of hours, the awnings are retracted, the metal tables are rolled back and a giant locomotive crawls through.
There’s no better way to end the journey than back on the water on what may be the only boat in Amphawa that offers a Thai foot massage.