Amphawa: just magic

A while back I did a post about the Mahachai-Mae Klong-Amphawa route - a fantastic little day trip out of Bangkok, with trains, a railway market, boats, and canals. I didn't get to spend much time in Amphawa that time round, and my camera gave out before I got there, so I've been wanting to go back and do it properly for ages. And last week I did.


Everything about Amphawa is delightful. It's a tiny village with a wide canal as its main thoroughfare, crossed by an ever-busy bridge that joins two halves of the market, which spills over both banks. Boats selling fruit and fresh seafood, as well as ones carrying tourists off on adventures, go up and down the canal. There are gorgeous guesthouses and homestays, and firefly-watching boat trips at night. The bankside market sells traditional sweets, retro-kitsch souvenirs, and a whole bunch of (tastefully!) cute stuff from independent artisans and designers. There's a definite tourist vibe, but it's geared towards Thai rather than farang visitors, and there's a real sense that it's a community project - no big corporations, no same-same tacky market tat; a lot of the small businesses have adopted firefly motifs as a kind of unofficial town logo, and the drinks vendors even sell 'Amphawa'-branded bottled water.

An amble through the market yields up all sorts of things you didn't know you needed, plus a good few gifts for friends and relatives. And sweets. Lots of sweets. I have a particular weakness for 'golden' sweets - thong-yip, foi-thong, etc - and guess what was the very first stall was selling?

Not just foi-thong; foi-thong in ceramic boats. With a paddle for cutlery. Place could not be more charming if it was shaped like a kitten and knew how to waltz.

... and a few stalls further in was one selling some very pretty thong-ek, with dabs of gold leaf on them. This is the market's tragic flaw: there's so much delicious food being sold in it that you risk filling up before you reach the canal, and you really should eat at the canal. Restaurants are set up on steep waterside steps, with miniature stools and benches acting as chairs and tables. Below are rows of moored boats with their noses nuzzling together; each boat a little kitchen specialising in one or two dishes - some do grilled prawns, squid, crab, or scallops, others do pad thai or som tam. These get passed up the crowded steps to the tables, money passed down. It's worth doing this just for the experience of eating in what is essentially a 30-capacity restuarant crammed onto a set of canal steps (it's cosy!); the hot delicious freshness of the food is a wonderful bonus.


The one thing I was really sad to miss on my last visit was the temple, which got a mention in my guidebook for its murals - and I love me some murals. So I was excited to check them out this time. Wat Amphawan Chetirayam dates from the early Rattanakosin period. Formerly the residential palace of Queen Amarindaramas (wife of Rama I), and the birthplace of Rama II, it was later renovated by the Queen into a temple in memory of her mother. The murals are a mix between scenes from literature, from daily life, and from royal ceremonies. And they're stunning. I took more photos than I'll ever know what to do with - these are just a few of my favourites:

Behind the Buddha image is Rattanakosin Island, bursting with detail.

A royal funeral procession. As this was painted some time in the first two reigns, this is very possibly the first ever royal funeral, that of Rama I's father, for which these golden chariots (that are still used today; you can see them in the National Museum) were built. Amazing.

Krai Tong, hero from folklore, diving down with his magic spear, cloth, and candle to defeat the Crocodile King Chalawan.

Detail from one of the courtly-life scenes. A lady and her maid, presumably, but looking rather excellently sapphic.

I can't recommend this place enough. It's far enough away from the city to feel like a proper break, but close enough to do in a day - or an evening, if you drive. Or a weekend, which I'd love to try. (there'll just have to be a third post in this series!) For the full day's adventure, get the train from Wongwien Yai to Mahachai, then a ferry across the river and another train to Mae Klong (and check out the railway market), and a songtaew to Amphawa (all this is described in this post). There are also buses to and from the city.

The Temple Fair

Happy Loy Kratong everybody! I'm breaking my hiatus to post a piece I wrote about the Wat Saket temple fair last year. It's a mad and magical experience, a real old-fashioned ngan wat the likes of which it's hard to come by in the city, and anyone with nothing to do on any of the next couple of nights should head on over there. It's a bit of a mystery fair, hard to track down the exact dates online, but it generally happens over several days around Loy Kratong night.
If you're coming from around Silom the number 15 bus should get you there, or if coming from Sukhumvit take the saen saep taxi-boat.

All the waterways are brimming, inky-black with city lights floating on them like heralds of the krathongs that will be launched in a few nights’ time. This moon’s waiting patiently to be filled to overflowing with light, the streets less so. Kratong stalls on any street near water, little floats of banana-trunk or lotus-petalled bread or the banned-in-theory polystyrene. Firework shops bought out. And fairs on temple grounds: in side streets tucked behind shops, or either side of the grand river-bridges, but most throngingly, blazily, blaringly at Wat Saket, the Golden Mount, temple and its surrounds packed, reveller-heaving.

Mixing currents of traffic and people under this brightlit hazy night—I’m not entirely sure this is the right bus or that the right stop, except on some level I am—the fair has a magnetism of its own, assures me this is the way. And suddenly the crowd’s pattern becomes obvious, turns from milling people and vendors and crawling tuktuks and balloon-sellers to a flow with a single direction, we’re both funnel and funnel’s contents, pouring like water into the temple’s grounds.

And I’m one with the crowd—it would take an effort not to be, to stay an onlooker only. There’s nowhere to duck out of the scene in order to photograph it; any snapshot will just have to contain half a dozen half-heads of fellow fair-goers. And here, at Loy Krathong that’s what everyone is, even if I’m a particularly lonely specimen, everyone else here with friends, family, parents with clouds of kids, bubbles of teenagers, close-pressed couples. We’re still not in the grounds proper, but a long fleshpacked avenue selling toys, 69-baht jeans, and sweets, roofed and walled with patchwork tin and tarpaulin, bulbs hanging all along it like fat buzzing stars on strings. No knowing how long it goes on—but here’s an opening, and through it a glimpse of open space. A Nang Nopamas talent show on a stage, blue-sequinned singer crooning Northeastern songs; shining in the air behind her, the Golden Mount itself, hanging between the black of the trees and of the sky as if floating on the night. There are folk crowding up its spiralling sides to pay respects at the top, and encircling its base, a great ring, a neon-sprinkled donut: the fair.

There are games stands—here, a father coaxing his son to shoot the bamboo arrow at a target, like a King Thotsarot teaching a young Rama—and souvenir sellers, and every other stall sells food: noodle shops with hook-pierced jellyfish hanging down in front of the counter, crepe-makers with sizzling hotplates, sweet-shops, meat shops.

‘This way!’ calls a man, into a megaphone; ‘Haunted shack, ten baht only!’ Real Wat Saket ghosts, I wonder? Could this tin shack with garish ghouls painted on crude banners over its facade house the ghosts of old plague-victims, the crowds of corpses that were once heaped on this ground? One way to find out: be packed into the entrance with a crowd of stranger, pushed in. The walls are all covered on the inside with black cloth, backdrop for the neon paint-spattered skeletons that dance about us, animated by string. A man in a white sheet with a devil mask follows us—CLANG! He rings the metal wall while we're distracted by something moving ahead. We press forward against each other to get away from the sound, jumpier than we should be in this tiny space that reverberates when struck. We're in for maybe a minute before being forced to escape by running past a leaping ghoul’s head—no way back, with more crowd pressing in behind us—the head is rubbery, jerking wildly on its rope, controlled from somewhere unseen. And we’re out, into the equally cramped outdoors.

There best way to get breathing space, it seems, is a 25-baht ticket onto one of the fun-sized ferris wheels that turn and turn, dwarfed by the ancient trees. I'm locked into a little round cage by myself, my weight lop-siding it. My 25 baht gets me more turns than I can keep count of. The lights from up here make the leaves look painted, cheaply enamelled, as they shake (it’s November, after all, itchy humid heat stirred by a smear of winter breeze). Through the leaves I can see a portion of the crowd, all heads and shoulders from up here, hemmed in by rides and sideshows and shops selling glazed grilled chickens, carousel-bright bottles of orange and lime juices. They’re so crammed together they’ve lost all sense of their way, looking back and forth for lost companions and finding a roving jam donut seller instead.

Tiny ferris wheels and enormous balloons, music and noise from everywhere, a radiance from the coil of pilgrims and a haze from the food-sellers, shrieking crowd, spirit-shrines, everything in this light, in these colours, disturbed, distorted, stretched or squashed out of proportion, all of us trapped in some yaksa’s human kaleidoscope. I go with the jostling flow, bumping up against a line of coin-operated fortune-telling shrines, finding coal-hot squid and shining bags of Chinese peanut toffee to buy. These stalls like the ones I came in by, though I haven’t passed the haunted house again. Everything’s kaleidoscope-shifted for real—surely that’s the ferris wheel I just got off—but suddenly I’m face-to-face with an oversized two-headed baby peering wide-eyed from a glossy banner. ‘See the mermaid’s child! Real live ghosts and monsters!' blare the megaphones. The banner also advertises Pii Krasue, Nang Tanee, pin-up mermaids. I know these ghosts well from my creased folklore books and B-movies watched disjointedly on youtube, but I’ve never seen one up close. Ferried along on the crowd-flow, I pay my coin and enter.

The inside space is outdoors too, a tree growing up from the dirt floor out through the roof, the only spot that could be found unfilled by food stalls. The promised ghouls are kept in booths, human heads growing from papier-mache ghost-bodies. A Pii Krasue's with a little girl's face, entrails hanging from her neck glistening red, sticks her tongue out; Nang Tanee's face grins, perched on a slender banana stem. You can see the mirrors if you look, but spotting them doesn't make the effect any less gruesome. Along the other wall is a narrow table supporting jars of foetuses—where in the wide warped city can those be from? Loaned from a hospital, the show-keeper’s private collection, or a black-magic-man? The two-headed human foetus floats there as advertised, another has its ears growing in its neck. Then the mer-baby—a real mermaid’s child, or a stillborn human with legs fused together? Goats and pigs with too many legs, and a naga—a real one, I’m sure of it, with a snout and crest like flames, shapes that should exist in carved gilded wood, not colourless flesh in formaldehyde. Thai teenagers peer with mild interest, and a tourist with his heavy black camera stays much longer than anyone else, leaning in to capture these strange sad en-jared beings, lens ghoulishly close.

Walking Tour: Talat Noi, Sampeng and Pahurat

There are infinite routes through Chinatown, and this is only one of them - I'll probably do more Chinatown walking guides, but this one is as good a starting point as any, and goes through places that even people used to Sampeng Lane and Yaowarat may find new and fascinating. It takes you through some very old and diverse communities, many of them dating back to the earliest days of Bangkok. Go in the morning to miss the worst of the heat, and for the morning-bustle and street breakfasts.

Start at Tha Si Phaya (a short express-boat ride from Sapan Taksin), and head upriver past River City and into a little market lane, where there are plenty of tempting breakfast options. Carry on going straight into Talat Noi, an old quarter with a real mix of ethnicities and architectures, where the oil and grease from heaped used car parts mingle with the scents steaming from food-vendors' carts. The mechanics' and car-parts shops are an evolution of the blacksmiths that originally plied their trade here. Go down soi Duang Tawan to see labyrinthine piles of motors in store-rooms behind mossy brick walls, vast trees bound in coloured ribbons, tiny alleys down to the bright river, birdsong from old-fashioned cages that hang from every roof-tip. In a car repair yard is the entrance to the Jao Sien Khong shrine, full of wonderful 3D mosaics of dragons and tigers. This area is an absolute must during the Vegetarian Festival in late October, when it becomes a thronging market of meat-free treats and sweets, and the Chinese shrines crowd with people and offerings and incense and entertainments.

Carry on to soi Phanu Rangsi, then turn right and then left onto Songwat road. On your left is Wat Prathum Khongkha, which dates back to the Ayutthaya period, and where the stone on which royal executions were once performed (by beating the person to death with a sandalwood club in a velvet sack) is still preserved. The rest of Songwat is a pleasant walk lined with a jumble of old and new facades, spice shops, rice warehouses. At the corner with Rachawong are some of the oldest remaining houses in Chinatown, with beautiful wooden walls and windows. Turn right and then left onto Sampeng Lane, the narrow shopping street that sells everything you never knew you needed. The lane is covered and some of the open shops blast air-con into it, so it's a nice place to walk if you don't mind small crowded spaces. Vendors come through, sometimes taking up the whole width of the lane with their carts of fruit or juice or steamed peanuts. Sampeng cuts across several roads, each interesting in their own right. Turn left on Chakrawat road to find Wat Chakrawat, where the architecture is a mix of Thai and Khmer, collections of Buddhas and assorted spirits and deities cluster in shady rockeries, and a fenced-off pond hosts crocodiles - supposedly; I saw none when I was there.

Across Chakrawat road and down Soi Bhopit Phimuk past the spice shops and ice shops, you'll reach a canal that marks a loose border to the Indian quarter. Little shops selling sweets line the canal, and tucked in dark air-con-freezy rooms are Indian restaurants. It may be around lunchtime when you reach this spot, so stop at the Royal India (I recommend the vegetarian thali). Then, across and right on Chakraphet raod is Pahurat cloth market, which as well as fabric sells dancing costumes, temple goods and offerings.

From Pahurat it's a short walk down to the river and Saphan Phut pier, where you can get the express boat back downtown. Or if you're not walked out, there's plenty more in the area to check out. The Old Siam mall and Sala Chalermkrung theatre are on the block next to Pahurat, and there are charming canals and temples to explore nearby, as mentioned in my post on the theatre. Or down by the Saphan Phut is Pak Klong Talat, the 24-hour flower market (though I think all these things are best explored in the evenings).

The walk in map form:

View Chinatown walk 1 in a larger map

Of Monkey Kings and Benjarong Temples

This building is the Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre - Thailand's first cinema, built in the early 1930s by HM King Rama VII. It still shows films occasionally, but nowadays is more frequently used as a theatre: every Friday and Saturday night at 7:30, a Khon (the traditional Thai masked dance-drama) show is performed there.

It's not cheap - 1000 or 1200 per ticket - but as this is one of the few remaining chances to see a Khon performance, and as far as I can find out, the only regular one, I went along yesterday evening and bought one. I went early to give myself time to explore the area around the theatre, and it's well worth a look. Mementos form various stages in Bangkok's development are clustered there, at the northernmost end of Chinatown. On the same block is the Old Siam mall, in a European colonial-style building, with a Thai 'food village' on the ground floor, and nearby is Chinaworld, originally the first of the now-ubiquitous Central department stores (worth a peek for the car-elevator up to the car park). Just up the road is one of Old Bangkok's preserved canals, with paved banks, little bridges, lined with shrines and homes, evening food vendors grilling catfish and boiling soups. Follow the canal left to Wat Rajabophit, built in 1869 under HM King Rama V. This is an incredible temple: architecture that dwarfs the visitor, compactly built in a space that seems to small to contain it (yes: it's bigger on the inside); walls of ceramic tiles in the traditional benjarong colours; a chapel with a traditionally Thai exterior and a Gothic interior; and a beautiful royal cemetery. The temple's wooden gates are all decorated with carvings of European-style soldiers.

Follow the canal the other way and you'll find Romaninart Park, formerly a prison site, and still retaining watch towers, part of the prison wall, and a museum. It's pleasantly breezy in the evenings, though not entirely peaceful, the thudding soundtrack of aerobics classes carrying over the whole of the grounds. There's also an outdoor gym.

Back to the theatre for the show, which was complied from the scenes in the Ramakian featuring Hanuman. The dancers perform highly acrobatic moves, accompanied by a live Thai orchestra and narrators who also deliver any dialogue in time with the characters' motions. Hanuman's stories are my favourite in the Ramakian - he's born from a cursed woman standing on one leg and Pra Isuan's divine weapons as blown into her mouth by a wind god; seduces a mermaid and has a "fish-tailed monkey" for a son; tricks the demon-king Thotsakan into giving him his heart in a box - on one level this is fun storytelling, on another, a chance to see a traditional Thai performance with only a few modern embellishments (flashing lights and some sound effects). The audience was tiny, which is sad; do consider going, as it's a different sort of evening out in a historically rich corner of town, and you'd be supporting the preservation of one of Thailand's most important performing arts.

If you're not too tired after the performance (as I was, with all the walking I'd done beforehand), you can wander down Triphet road to Pak Klong Talat, the all-night flower/fruit/veg market, or Saphan Phut night market, selling second-hand clothing and other fashion items.

Getting there: Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre is on the corner of Triphet and Charoen Krung, accessible by bus numbers 1, 8, 48 and 73 along Charoen Krung, or by express-boat to Sapan Phut (N6) and a short walk, or on foot from most places in Chinatown and Rattanakosin Island. Here's a map from their website.

The Night Temple

As soon as I heard Wat Pho had extended its opening hours to 9 p.m. I was itching to pay it a night-time visit. I'll never get tired of Wat Pho, which has an edge over most of the temples in Bangkok for me because it's just weirder: the dimensions of the Reclining Buddha obscured by thick pillars and leaping suddenly out, surely too big to be contained in that chapel; stupas mosaicked with ceramic instead of mirrors, in picture-book colours. A courtyard full of Chinese ballast statues, cartoonish faces, unreal bodies, mad expressions. My favourite are the hatted and bulb-nosed European stone giants that guard the inner gates - they even manage to be surreal when described on dry tourist information sites, as "four pairs of Marco Polo".

Night just makes it more unreal. To start with, when I went down at sunset yesterday, I wasn't sure if it was open - most of the gates were shut, and the signs outside said it closed at 5 p.m. Then I found one last open gate, beyond which the ticket booth was still selling tickets (B50) and another sign said that the temple closed at 6 p.m. I wandered around the grounds for a while, and they were still letting people in when I left, some time around 8. Seeing it without crowds, and with stray night breezes gusting through the courtyards, was pleasant and a little creepy. It wasn't as well-lit as I'd expected, which made going through the statue-filled grounds all the creepier; I couldn't stop thinking of Miyazaki's Spirited Away and expecting lanterns to glimmer into being and the stone creatures to come to life. A few buildings were lit up golden among the shadow-spires; a few stray cats and dogs kept me company.

After that I walked out and away to the river to Saranrom Royal Park, which has in its lifetime been a palace garden and a zoo, and has a monument to a drowned queen, some lovely haunted-looking trees and good night-time people-watching.

In all, an excellent evening out for a loner flâneur with an overactive imagination.



Wat Pho is located on Sanam Chai road and Maharaj road next to the Grand Palace. Admission 50 baht, 'polite dress' required (no shorts). Very close to Tha Tien express boat pier.