Boats and Snakes

Boxing Day was our trip to the famous floating markets. I had heard mixed reports about this, varying from ‘god-awful tourist trap’ to ‘a fun authentic experience’, and I feel that my experience sits somewhere in between these 2 extremes. It was fun, but yes it was a tourist-trap. It wasn’t authentic, but no it wasn’t god-awful!

The trip began with one of my favourite parts of the day ; a long tail boat ride to the floating market itself. It was great fun ; bumpy, fast, and again…the hair should definitely have been tied up (tuk tuk hair, long tail boat hair...the list continues!). As the boat turned the final bend in the river, the floating market came into sight, in all its crowded, touristy, colourful, loud glory! We then jumped on another boat (this time a punt-style boat), and were taken on a slow amble up the floating market area and back again. Basically, all of the people in the boats buying…were foreign. And all of the people selling, were obviously Thai. So, in a way it was just like one huge souvenir and fruit shop on water! But it was fun…really fun! I can imagine if people go there expecting a real authentic slice of everyday Thai life, then they are going to be hugely disappointed. But if you go just to see the spectacle, marvel at the brightly coloured fruit, and bathe in the exciting ‘we’re on holiday’ atmosphere, then it’s great fun. We sampled some Thai sweets (made from egg…gross!), some new fruits (mangosteen and pommello), bartered at some of the stalls and rounded the time there off with a bowl of yummy noodles. As I said, a great place for cool photos, souvenirs, and people watching…and also a chance to try and imagine what the floating markets were actually like when it was just the local Thai people, buying and selling the local produce, before the sweaty foreigners buying ‘I love Bangkok’ t-shirts came along!

As we went to the floating markets with a tour company, we headed off for the next part of the half-day package…the cobra show! Now, I was a bit dubious about this, and thought it was going to be the tackiest thing ever. I’m also not really a big fan of snakes. But it was part of the package, and so we thought we should go in. After wandering round looking at the snakes in cages for 10/15 minutes, we were then asked to enter the show ‘arena’ for the main event. It was actually really impressive…well, you know… impressive in the way of ‘wow look at the man catching a cobra in his mouth’, rather than ‘god, how did the Egyptians make those pyramids’ impressive. It’s all relative! I was rather enjoying watching the show, and so I decided that I might as well take the opportunity, and have a photo of me with one of the snakes round my neck. Well, you just never know when you’re going to get these ‘opportunities’ again in life. It was fine…bit scary, and the snake felt soooo heavy, but I’m chuffed that I did it. That’s as close to being Indiana Jones as I’m ever going to get!!!! Haha! A really fun day all in all!