The Damnoen Saduak Floating Market

Location: Bangkok and Damnoen Saduak, Thailand

On Thursday, we woke up early to head out for our tour of the Floating Markets of Damnoen Saduak. These markets are located about one and a half hours outside of Bangkok. These river markets used to be a traditional way of selling goods, until people moved to the cities. They have since made a recovery as tourism has come to the area. So, while not being wholly authentic, it is pretty neat to experience.

Our tour bus picked us up from the hotel at 7:15 am. The floating market closes at 11:30am, so we had to get there early to see them. We headed out, and about an hour later, our tour guide told us that we were ahead of schedule, and could make a stopover at a coconut farm. While not exactly what we paid for, we still thought it was interesting, and walked around for about 10 minutes. Our tour guide let us sample some pure coconut sugar, which was very tasty. We got to see the pots they use to make the sugar, and many wares made of coconut wood:

After this, we made it to the drop off point of the floating markets. At this point, we departed the bus and took a longtail boat to the markets. These boats were basically long canoes, with an attached long pole sticking out the back, which had a motor at the end:

The ride to the market was pretty neat-the boat went really fast at points, and yet the design of the boat basically prevented any water from splashing inside. Here's a video of part of the ride:

Once we got to the floating market, we disembarked, only to get on a smaller, paddled canoe. This was the canoe that led us through the market. The market is very chaotic-plenty of canoes shifting their way through the very narrow canal, each one holding different wares, including fruits, meats, soups, crafts, and hats:

Some of the salespeople even had hooks that they used to tug our canoe towards their "shop". At this point, we had been through so many markets in so many countries, so we were used to turning down aggressive salespeople, and we did pretty well here also-but this setup presented a new challenge-we actually could not walk away from these salespeople, and the canoe went at a very slow pace-so we were actually stuck staring at them after we turned down their wares, which was a little awkward.

After seeing the markets for about an hour, our tour guide decided that we were still ahead of schedule, and that we would be visiting an elephant farm. I decided to take an elephant ride, which was definitely a very touristy thing to do, but still kinda fun:

The "driver" actually sat directly on the elephant's head, and would make a series of grunts to direct the elephant where to go. At one point, there was a stream that the elephant crossed-it was almost too deep for the elephant to walk through; and he had to lift his trunk up out of the water. This area also had a monkey exhibit, but Ben had already had enough experiences with monkeys in Marrakesh, and so we declined to take a look.

After this, our tour guide took us to another stop: a snake farm. Here the offer was for what was billed as "The Most Exciting Show in the World": basically, a man fending off an attack from three poisonous snakes with his hands and his mouth. At this point, we had started to notice a theme to these stops: they were to random stops along the road designed to separate tourists from their money. We and the other people with us were getting slightly annoyed, and so we decided not to see the show, satisfied that we had made the right decision. Then, we were taken to another stop-a wood carving place. This was basically a souvenir shop, with some guys carving wood at the front. The carved pieces looked very beautiful, but we did not buy anything here.

After this, we were driven back to Bangkok, with yet another stop at a souvenir shop in the city. Billed as the "Largest Gem Store in the World", it was very boring and useless to us. Finally, we got a bus ride back to our hotel.

In the evening we walked around the Patpong area again. We bargained some pretty good deals here, as we've become seasoned pros at this point. I got a nice polo shirt for 25o Baht (8 dollars), down from 950 Baht (31 dollars). Ben later got the same polos for 150 Baht, but still good deals both. I also got a nice set of wooden candle holders for 400 Baht, down from 1200 Baht. We then once again decided that the neighborhood was too sketch for us, and just went to a bar in a hotel for a little while. The following day, we took it easy, and flew to Phuket in the afternoon. We got an bus shuttle from the airport to our hotel in Phuket. The bus stopped at a tourist booking shop along the way. These stops seem to be the name of the game in Thailand. I was fed up with all the extra stops at this point, and flat out refused to look at their offerings, even though I knew I'd want to do one at some point in the next couple of days. I figured I'd get a better deal somewhere else as well.

Our hotel was the last stop on the bus. It is a very nice hotel, right on the Patong Beach. Post on Phuket coming soon...