Walking through Bangkok’s everyday theatres
Two walking tours provide a glimpse of daily life in Bangkok, far from the city’s malls and glamorous nightlife
We eat century eggs standing in the alleyway next to a building that holds a warren of individual one-room homes—much like Mumbai’s chawls, though these only occupy the ground floor. There’s washing hanging behind us, and I can see people moving around in the dim interior of the flat next door, going about their daily activities seemingly indifferent to us, the onlookers, for whom this is quite the opposite of the ordinary. As someone steps out to keep an offering on the spirit-house we are standing next to, it strikes me how odd the act of travelling is. What is mundane and everyday for one becomes exotic and memorable for the other.
We are in the Trok Mor wet market in Bangkok, Thailand, determined to see the much-travelled city through a fresh lens—though nothing is perhaps quite fresh in today’s over-touristed world. The century eggs are certainly unique to me—dark brown-black inside and out, including the yolk, which looks a bit like blackcurrant jelly. Someone on the internet had described the smell as “wet socks left in the laundry bag for a week", and they weren’t far off, I think to myself—though I don’t say this out loud, because my companion on the tour and the tour guide herself are eating them with great relish.
Ah well, even among the Thai-Chinese population that forms a majority of the residents and shop-owners of this street, many are not fans, says Aon, our guide. We are in the midst of controlled chaos—it’s 9 in the morning and the market lines both sides of the street with hawkers selling everything from fresh fish, meat and vegetables to home-made curries and stir-fries, packed in banana leaves for commuters to take to work. Apart from the century eggs, we try kanom krok or coconut milk pancakes, which look and taste like paniyaram, and sweetish rice-flour fritters sprinkled with sesame seeds that go down brilliantly with coffee from the ubiquitous 7-Eleven.
The chatty and sharp Aon, whose full name is Thanaporn Cheangneua, conducts the tour almost every day in the tourist season, between October and February. We meet at the curiously named “Giant Swing" outside Wat Suthat Thepwararam in Bangkok’s Phra Nakhon district—we learn that the name of the district is part of the original name of Bangkok city; this was the nucleus around which the metropolis grew. The “swing" itself is a 50ft tall bright red frame—the actual boat-shaped structure that swung from it was removed decades ago after fatal accidents during an annual religious ceremony.
After a quick walk inside Wat Suthat, we dive into the maze of streets behind it, stopping at a traditional medicine house, Bamrungchat Satsana Yathai Pharmacy, founded over 100 years ago and still operational, both as a pharmacy and as a museum.
The aim of this tour, says Aon, is to show visitors a glimpse of daily life in Bangkok; one that isn’t visible from the malls and restaurants of Sukhumvit and Khao San Road. Over five hours, we wander through backstreets and alleys, looking at a curious and eclectic collection of objects that I suspect are included in the tour because Aon finds them interesting (as good a way of seeing a city as any, if you ask me). An old building converted into a school run by a royal lady; a monster black rooster worth lakhs of rupees because it is a prize-fighter in the city’s legal cockfighting arenas; a street lined with pavement food stalls where workers take an early lunch break.
We wander into a couple of wats: incongruously beautiful and opulent Buddhist temples that seem to have sprung up in the middle of everyday streets where people lounge around smoking and children play. It’s the other way around, of course—life sprang up around the wats, which are an integral part of the city’s daily life. We end the tour after mid-day on a holy note: up on the tower of the glorious Wat Ratchanatdaram, which houses a relic of the Buddha, reached by climbing up a dizzying spiral staircase.
The next evening finds us riding towards Yaowarat Road as part of a guided tour on tuk-tuks through a few other parts of old Bangkok: primarily, the city’s Chinatown and its famous food street, as well as the Pak Khlong Talat flower market. The city, sleepy and slow in the daytime, truly comes alive at night. Yaowarat Road is quite the sensory overload even for an Indian tourist—giant red and yellow banners that are ads for the many gold jewellery stores around the area hang high along the entire stretch of the street, the pavements are lined with busy hawker stalls selling everything from octopus and fried insects on sticks to the crowd-favourite mango sticky rice. We stop at a stall that casually displays its Michelin Guide mention and sells only one thing: patonggo (deep fried dough balls similar to doughnuts or churros) with pandan custard.
This is a more touristy walk than Aon’s—though even here, there are more locals than tourists, including a woman on a scooter with two yappy Pekingese dogs in a basket under her feet. It’s almost performative—as if the city is determined to show us everything that’s picturesque and endearing.
Is travel essentially voyeuristic, seeking out novelty and performance because the traveller is primed to do so? Did we just indulge in the kind of tourism white tourists do in Dharavi? These questions trouble me—but then I recall the night-time tour of Bengaluru’s old markets from a year ago. Aren’t we all visitors and strangers to every space that is not our own, and sometimes even into our own lives?
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