Water Taxi Loss

We are now settled in, have had lunch and have no plans until 8 o'clock when we will lose the triva game at the Pickled Liver. We most enjoy the people watching here in Bangkok and decide to go down to the river and watch those people for a bit at the tiny beer hut where one can still get a beverage for under $1.

We successfully remind ourselves how to get there traversing the transfer station heading in the right direction on the first try! We get to the end of the line and the river only to find that our oasis has dissappeared. This is a great loss as this is a fantastic meeting up place. Now just a chaotic merge of people, hawkers and boats in and out....

We jump on the tourist taxi and head over to Banglampo where there are yet more interesting people to watch. Somehow we almost miss it as I steer us up deadend alleys where the residents tell us no tourists. It takes us some time to find our way out.

The heat we didn't feel on the night of arrival is sufficating us now. We stop for a shaded, fanned beverage. I will stay hydrated on tons of bottled water, Vic prefers a beer.

We seem to find ourselved in need to move about the city in great distances right at rush hour. So here we are all the way to the west at the river and want to go downtown. Nobody really wants to go there in the congestion of Five PM. We negotiate hard, they negotiate harder. Most will take us for a good price if we agree to one stop for shopping. Somewhere along the line they have established a shopping commission. We think not.

Finally one tuk-tuk driver says okay, 190 baht, (divide by 3 for a rough USD conversion) We say okay and off we go on our one hour open air ride during rush hour. Exhausting! and very exciting. Any time there was no oncoming traffic, we took that lane. Imagine that, along with a few other tuk-tuks and all the motorcycles. When a car would come, we would squeeze as far as we could into our real lane, but were still mostly in the on-coming lane. Victor thinks my parents would love the adventure of Bangkok.