The Floating Markets of Damnoen Saduak just outside the city limits of Bangkok seemed like the idyllic getaway reserved more for fantasy works of fiction akin to J.R Tolkien than a popular spot for tourists to shop. The name itself inspired visions of a tranquil bazaar suspended above the worries of our ordinary lives, where bright colours co-existed in friendly abundance with the mysterious vendors displaying goods found nowhere else on the globe. To be conveyed about like otherworldly royalty from shop to curio spot by a wooden boat combining the romanticism of Venice with the enigmatic mysteries of the Far East sounded too salacious to be true.
And it was.
The adventure began as most commonplace procedures seem to; at 5AM in the morning with the alarm going off – as shrill as an angry housewife in a stereotypical cartoon for children – next to your sleeping form. But that didn’t matter to me; I was going to someplace magical and exciting. Even magical and exciting things have to get up early in the day to fully utilize the time we have for optimal levels of magical excitedness yes?
I met my comrade for the trip, Adrianne, in the lobby downstairs ready to wipe the sleep from our eyes and get to the journey from central Bangkok to the Floating Markets located in the Ratchaburi Province of Thailand… a two hour journey.
But what was a mere two hours? Frodo and Sam had to traverse through three long-haul movies combined to span nine hours and eighteen minutes (or eleven hours and 36 minutes if you fancy watching the extended editions). Two hours was nothing and we could catch up on lost sleep anyway. Which we tried… despite the shuttle bus filled with screeching children and apathetic parents – but it’s okay because they were part of the adventure too.
Arriving at our destination we were given two options for the next two hours; walk around at our own pace and see what the market had to offer by foot, or pay a small extra fee and do the boat rides through and around the market place.
Well I didn’t come here to walk. I wanted emulate Georgie after his meeting with Pennywise and float too. But as Adrianne and I soon discovered, that was also the goal of every other tourist this side of the hemisphere.
We joined the small crowd waiting to get on-board the make-shift wooden boats and start the journey of a thousand wonders – which would turn out to be wondering “when does this hell end” as we would come to find.
The adventure begins with the realisation that it will be old grannies rowing the wooden boats around and sense of discomfort that it will be old grannies rowing us around. Adrianne leans over to me and whispers “Well look at them… I can’t but think ‘what’s your bloody excuse?’ when I don’t make it to the gym in the future” which has us in childish fits of giggles. It will be the last time I remember laughing or feeling such joy for a while.
We make our way to the front of the line and into our designated wooden boat. We seem to have drawn the lucky card and have a younger rower, a woman who seems to be in her early or mid-thirties as opposed to her Golden Years. It would be the last time I would feel “lucky” for a while.
The wooden boat pushed out into the calm waters and I began snapping away with my camera and drinking in the sights, sounds and smells around me with a sense of tranquillity.
It would be the last time I felt anything else other than white hot angst for a while.
Let me break down the elements that made what was supposed to be a lovely half an hour / forty five minute journey into a two hour long mess:
- You can’t really head to the stalls that seem interesting to you, the rower seems to glide past them, swatting aside water and your protests alike as you’re forced towards only certain stalls which are no doubt ones operated by her confidants.
- The traffic got bad really quickly and it dissolved into rush hour in Bangkok but without the safety net of road rules, traffic lights or sane drivers.
- Because of this, there are large periods of time you are doing NOTHING. Very long periods.
- The food and refreshment rafts always seem to be on the other side of the traffic. Hunger and thirst are your companions instead of Merry and Pippin.
- Some of the larger boats run on petrol and emit bursts of sulphuric smoke ranging from wispy white to thunderous black. All of it smells awful and it often happens directly next to you. Usually in an adventure this might mean the Dragons lair was nearby but instead of gold and silver it was over-priced fabrics and….more overpriced fabrics.
- Our “lucky” young rower didn’t seem to know where the hell she was going and more than once went in a wayward path that would lead to us getting stuck between a squadron of rafts heading in the opposite direction. At which point she would start screeching at other boats to let her through. I decided she was the dragon.
- We were supposed to be there for 45 minutes. We were there for just under two hours.
And of course this Faux-Venice-come-Thailand hell ate all the time we had before we had to go meet the rest of the group at the designated meeting spot. We were met with stern glares for being a couple of minutes late (how dare we) and were promptly whisked away to a different part of the market where we were informed we would be going for a speedier boat mission through a native village that lived by the rivers.
I was apprehensive to go near anything water related for a while but was mollified when I saw no other boats anywhere and that they had coconut ice cream available to placate Smaug the Dragon that was burning in my stomach for some food and drink. As we waited for this speedboat to arrive in the port we were in I began side-eyeing the marketing areas that were accessible only by foot, which held some wares that promised sparks of interest and exotic undertakings like a large python the owner was wrapping around tourists for a picture souvenir piece they could show back home to the family to show how brave they were in the face of a large and very tamed animal. But I was already being harried into another devilish contraption – I had quite lost my idealism about these boats and their intentions by now – so I thought I would simply attend to those more promising skirmishes when this tour of the village was complete.
It wasn’t hellishly exciting to be very frank. It looked like any other small village in Thailand as we whizzed by in a chariot of river spray and gasoline. Some huts here and there, a small statue by what was supposedly a temple there. A dog lying on its side in the sun lifted his tail in our general direction as a lazy greeting – arguably the most exciting thing to happen the entire “adventure”.
The speedboat pulled to a stop by a dingy warehouse area where a couple of sickly looking stalls half-heartedly displayed their product amid the backdrop scenery of old cerement and dried dog faeces. I figured this was a quick rest stop before we were to head back to the Floating Markets where I could get some real exploring and shopping done.
That is until I saw we were by a parking lot and the shuttle that had brought us here from Bangkok was parked a few metres away. The sinking feeling I had that the adventure had come to an end was only compounded by the cheerful tour group leader exclaiming “Did everyone have fun?”
This did not deign a civil response.
————————————————————–
How I would have fixed the situation:
- Limit the amount of tourists at one time who would be in the boats rafting around the area.
- Put up some bloody traffic lights at the intersections of the rivers
- Burn the place to the ground
Overall it was a good two hours of my life (six if I happened to count the journey heading there and back being monotonously dull – and I do) that I could have rather been doing something more stimulating. Like staring at a wall or inhaling car fumes. Or just gorging my face full of delicious Thai food, so I wouldn’t put it on a list of must-see’s for friends wanting to experience the wonders of Thailand.
What I recommend to you?
If you truly want to see some wondrous Floating Markets- there are quite a few of them so odds are at least one is good – I suggest not going to the busiest one. Honestly most of the products on display were a copy-and-paste of their neighbours and it would have been a more pleasant experience if the whole thing was smaller and less crowded.
Also I recommend just not going as it was boring as hell. You want to shop? Go to the night markets in the city; great deals, plenty of space to walk around and the only fumes are the smells of delicacies awaiting your consumption.
Now if you’ll excuse me; I’m off for a pint with Frodo and Samwise to chat about our too-long adventures and for a well-deserved rest.
And recover from my new found fear of running water and grannies with oars.
