Bangkok is having a cold snap right about now–lows in the upper sixties, highs around eighty–which make it far more tolerable to explore on foot than usual. Or, as I found Saturday, by bike.
Across the Chao Praya, trapped in a looping bight of the river, a chunk of the city has been preserved, at least in part, as the sort of sparsely inhabited, foliage bedecked marshland that the entire area must have been circa 1782 when King Rama I wandered along and declared it the seat of empire.
It took a more recent king, King Bhumibol, to act to preserve the land. Alongside a city that is permanently under construction and ever-encroaching into the flat, rice-growing farmlands around it, it must have taken a kingly act of willpower and political gravitas to pull it off, but Bhumibol seems to have been just that sort of monarch. In 2016, shortly after his death, the military government announced a plan to safeguard the area, called Bang Krachao or “The Green Lung.”
The Green Lung is an island now, cut across at the narrowest part of its base with a canal (technically five islands–smaller canals chop it apart above the main canal) to shorten the trip upriver for vessels that can navigate it. It’s connected there by bridges to the greater Bangkok regional transit grid, but it is served by only a single main road along the axis and you can tell from the name of that road–Phetchahung Alley–that it’s not exactly a high-capacity thoroughfare.
So ferries serve to carry tourists and locals alike back and forth to Bang Krachao. Because the ferries are small and the roads narrow throughout the peninsula, bikes and motorbikes are the favored means of transportation. Which means that instead of car ferries, there are motorcycle ferries!
My entire luggage allotment for this trip was a 25 liter bag so obviously I don’t have a bike handy, but it’s possible to rent them near the ferry landings. My friend Monica has a fold-away Dahon Mariner that fits neatly into the trunk of her Toyota Vios.
After the usual white-knuckle ride to the ferry terminal (since the ferry terminal has no parking, Monica entered into some impenetrable but apparently commonplace deal with a gentleman standing the parking lot of an adjacent temple, where a funeral was being held and a spare parking space would apparently not be missed) we hopped right on to the ferry… along with twenty or so other passengers and about a half dozen motorcycles, gunned across a sheet metal ramp that is dropped across to the deck from the dock.
For both people and motorcycles it’s a quick trip across the river, the ferry pilot playing Frogger with the long barges bringing rice down from the Thai heartland and the pocket-sized LNG freighters ducking in and out of the nearby refinery.
I don’t know if it’s coincidence or a practical outcome of the religion-inducing ferry rides, but there was another temple at the landing on the island when we got off the boat. In the shade of the trees outside the temple, stacks of rusty, dusty, single-speed old bikes stand ready for both locals and tourists to rent out. Each have a handy basket on the front for snacks, drinks, or cell phones.
It’s only 50 baht, or just $1.50, to rent a bike for the afternoon there, but then, the bike is only worth about $0.25. After a moderately reassuring brake check and a few tentative laps I picked out what appeared to be the most robust of the lot, good old number 57. The chain felt like it was going to jump off anytime I put any real kick to the pedals, so I pedaled as gingerly as possible.
Although there aren’t a lot of cars on Bang Krachao, the Thai approach to driving carries over to motorbiking and cycling alike. No helmets are worn, no traffic rules are observed, texting and cellular conversations while driving are encouraged, and speeds are whatever you can muster up along the occasional straightaway.
Surprisingly, I didn’t have any trouble keeping to the left on the narrow roads, maybe because I was on a bike instead of in a car. I followed Monica up the road, a smoothly paved path that was about a car and a half wide, and lined on both sides with the usual assortment of shops, restaurants, cafes, and, of course, more temples.
Although Monica had been to Bang Krachao before, her sense of direction makes following her blindly a risky proposition, so I tried to keep track of where we were as we pedaled along. There is some signage in English, at least to indicate the popular tourist destinations, and I stopped every now and again to check my phone. Apple Maps are marginal at best even in the first world and almost utterly useless outside of major Western cities, but the compass feature on my iPhone was helpful when put together with the (also utterly awful but at least including local features) map provided by the bike rental place.
So after not terribly long and without too many wrong turns we found ourselves at the Siamese Fighting Fish Gallery, deep in the heart of the jungle.
There weren’t any actual fights there, which was fine by me, but simply jar after jar of delightfully colorful and oddly proportioned fish. The jars were separated by small slips of cardboard–apparently, the fish get pretty riled up if they can see their neighbor through the glass.
The more interesting thing to me than the actual fish (and there were a lot of fish there) were the grounds on which the gallery resided. Thai property rights and management have always been mysterious to me, but the parcel seemed to be centered around a large, placid lake edged with manicured grass and a handful of outbuildings of various eras and conditions. A rusting backhoe was parked on the lawn, weeds growing up through the machinery.
The whole place looked like a KOA that wasn’t getting much business (although there were a row of tents pitched toward the back that looked as if they might have been either really cheap AirBnb accommodations or really expensive eco-adventure rentals). A set of changing rooms was marked as being off-limits. Nearby, a stylish, glass-walled pavilion looked like it might have been supposed to be a cafe. Part of it seemed to have once been a Flintstone’s-themed outdoor restaurant. Having once run into a Donald Duck statue in a wat, it wasn’t all that surprising to find Dino hanging out in the jungle, but it made me intensely curious what the story was.
I never found out though, as we hit the road again heading for a park area in the heart of the island called the Sri Nakhon Khuean Khan Park and Botanical Garden.
Although the park isn’t very large, as botanical gardens go, it sort of bleeds over into the otherwise undeveloped area around it and so it seems pretty huge. The trails are more rough but a few lakes make it a lovely stop and a large viewing tower takes you up to the level of the tree canopy to get a closer look at the vegetation and birds.
Honestly, I wish I had more time and had looked around more, but I was distracted by the prospect of my front wheel parting ways with the rest of the bike if I hit a rock in the trail at the wrong angle, so I focused more on the pedaling than my surroundings. We did a circuit of one of the lakes then angled out onto the main road again to loop back toward the ferry landing.
We got jammed up behind another group of cyclists at one point, and Monica, deploying her finely-honed Thai-driving skills, blasted right through them at the first opportunity without incident. With my clunkier machine and frailer nerves, I found myself stuck behind the slowest and clunkiest member of the pack, until we were both several curves behind everyone else. Whereupon the girl, for a girl it was, promptly lost control and steered herself right off the edge of the road.
Some sort of thick grass broke the fall and kept her out of the muck, but the hefty rental bike kept going. She was trying to hold onto it and the edge edge of the road and not having much luck.
I summoned whatever ancient impulses of chivalry were required to suppress my utter certainty that a herd of cobras was surely lounging just past the side of the pavement and reached down to haul her up, then the bike.
“Korp kun ka,” she said, and I offered “Mai Pen Rai” in return and then took advantage of the opportunity to get back on the road ahead of her and make up some time.
Everyone was waiting at the next intersection, and while the girl filled in her companions on the excitement, Monica and I took off up the road at our own pace once again.
We swept through the narrow green isles of musty, tangy jungle, passed by bikers on coughing old scooters and modern Kawasakis, stinking of exhaust. Cyclists meander casually along the edges on antique, rusting bicycles, squeaking and squealing as their GPS-enabled smartphones whisper directions to them from the baskets. We pass ancient homes with solar arrays on the rooftops and nameless shacks sinking slowly into the swampy mire, right next door to sleek modern homes rising on piers from the primordial ooze. Wireless enabled cameras survey the road, relaying crisp HD imagery of sleeping dogs, wandering pigs, and other traffic back to the Ministry of Transport. Monks in bright orange robes perched serenely next to larger-than-life advertisements for high-speed cellular data plans.
This is the future I was promised by Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson. This is the cutting edge put to ancient and tribal purposes, the street finding its own uses for technology. I’m in a cyberpunk novel, on the original set of Blade Runner.
All along the main road, narrow, raised concrete paths lead off into the foliage and swampland. A few of them have some rusty handrails along the sides, but for the most part you are expected to exercise prudence and take some personal responsibility for not plummeting off into the slime ten or twelve feet below.
At one of these intersections, Monica stopped and turned and gave me one of her Monica looks.
“Promise me you won’t fall off,” she said, as if I could offer any such assurance even if I’d been on a mechanically-sound bike. But she didn’t wait, but just headed off along the sidewalk, and I was left to follow and hope she knew where she was going.
It was a more peaceful ride than out on the main drag, although negotiating 90 degree corners without plunging over the side required dredging up some long-forgotten biking skills. Passing the occasional local or tourist heading the other direction also required some smiles and balance.
The narrow walkways are the only route to many homes and business in Bang Krachao, though, so from time to time you are bound to encounter folks pulling large carts full of supplies, or pushing wheelbarrows with groceries in them. You slow to their pace for a while until you can convince them to let you inch past or there’s a branch in the trail network.
We finished up the day with a drink at the Bangkok Treehouse, an eco-tourist destination along the shores of the Chao Praya. The lower level is all bike parking; from the rooftop deck, a fine view of the river with a cool glass of crushed ice with mint and lime offers a relaxing perspective on the vessel traffic that you can’t experience on the water itself. Across the river, Bangkok hustles and smokes at its natural pace. But for a while, if you glance behind you into the still-calm forest, you can get a sense of how it all once must have been.
