On yer bike
Tours and museums don’t appeal to Louise Rodden’s teenage son. Could a ride with a difference through the Thai capital with his (outof-practice) mum change things? Photography by Christopher Wise
You alright mum?” asks Felix, throwing me a concerned glance as I wobble in his wake. It is a bit like one of those motion simulator rides. All bumpy and heart-thumpy and a threat at every turn. Only we are not wasting our money on some fairground gizmo. We are simply attempting to cycle through the rush hour streets of Bangkok.
Simply? Am I mad? I haven’t been on a bike for six months! As you can well imagine, I’m a bit wobbly. And my 13-year-old son, cycling blithely ahead of me, has only just passed his proficiency test.
A juggernaut pulls up at the lights, just inches from Felix, and now there’s a tuk-tuk belching fumes our way, and attempting to squeeze in on the other side. I keep throwing a
mental lasso of love towards my son, as he hits the pedal on green.
We’re not alone, mind you. There are three other people sharing this madness. One of them is our guide, a serious young woman with owlish spectacles called Neung. She is currently making flappy motions with her left hand, in an attempt to get us across five lanes of traffic, before those smog-wreathed beasts of steel mow us down.
So. Not a typical family holiday experience, you are thinking. But wait… there is a happy ending. Felix and I are about to be rewarded for our bravery. We are to experience an alternative side of Bangkok – a jungly oasis, located just a short hop from the capital’s urban sprawl.
The night before, I had been chatting with a family friend – a Thai lady who lives in Bangkok – and she had professed not to know of Bang Kra Jao, our ‘green lung’ destination. That seemed such an extraordinary thing, given the district is so near to the heart of busy Sukhumvit. But then again, there are 50 or so districts in Bangkok, and Bang Kra Jao is merely an island sub-district, formed by a loop in the river – with no bridge connecting it to the rest of the capital.
At Klong Tao Pier, the ferryman loads our bikes onto his longtail boat, for the short ride across the Chao Phraya. My son is entranced by the river life, the long barges tugging enormous mobile homes, or pyramids of scrap metal; the whizzy longtail taxis ferrying passengers to and fro. He also seems completely sanguine about our recent baptism by fire along the highways of Bangkok. Unlike me. I’m still sweating and trying to get my heart rate down.
No matter. Bang Kra Jao turns out to be as different in tempo from the rest of Bangkok as a lullaby is to a heavy metal riff. And in looks too: light-years away from the brashness of the night markets where, the evening before, Felix had gone mad, overspending on T-shirts, despite my hissing “think Primark!” at him.
Neung tells us the heart of the community here is still the village temple. And western faces are rarely seen. There is relatively little traffic too – except for the odd three-wheeler truck carting vegetables to the moored boats along the wharf. And we soon discover why. The centre of this extraordinary patch of green is criss-crossed with tiny waterways – Bang Kra Jao’s swampy jungle floor – over which a network of raised concrete paths runs; some only a metre and a bit wide.
“You all right mum?” Felix asks again. But there is no need for his worry. We are taking a relaxed pace on this 16-mile flat and leisurely four-hour ride, as we trundle through villages, past small schools and bright temples.
So far, it all seems wonderfully easy, and visually stunning; from the concrete pathways carpeted with damp pale hibiscus petals, flattened to confetti softness, to the sounds of exotic hidden birds, the whirr of our bike wheels and dogs barking in the distance.
In a school backyard, neatly dressed schoolchildren sitting ramrod straight, in tidy rows, stop their chanting in unison to wave to us as we whiz by. The air is rich with a fantastically heady mix of newly split logs and crushed flowers, and the heat of the day is kept at bay by the canopy of banana leaves and jack fruit trees.
We are joined on this journey by Bryn, a twentysomething backpacker from Toronto, and Bill, an Australian, fixing his teeth on the cheap in Bangkok’s pristine clinics.
I admire him, especially when he tells me he is fresh from root canal surgery that morning. Now here he is, negotiating another sort of canal, without so much as a wince of pain.
Our first stop is at Bangnamphung Floating Market – a locals-only weekend event, where Felix is amazed by the eccentric goods on sale. “What are those?” he asks, pointing to a box of squirmy live eels, a look of horror on his face. He is also intrigued and enchanted by the tiny baby terrapins, the mounds of waxy-petalled orchids, and a couple of tanks filled with live frogs.
The chatter is deafening: stallholders and buyers bargaining simultaneously, and just ahead of us, a string of café tables where tired shoppers sit, scooping up noodles and comparing their purchases.
At times, we catch distant glimpses of Bangkok’s skyline – an incongruous reminder in this watery-green oasis of just how near we are to the hectic heart of the capital.
Finally, we stop at an incense workshop run by a lovely Thai lady called Ganyaborn. She talks us through the various processes, telling us that profits from everything they sell here are ploughed back into the local community.
Felix even has a go at rolling his own joss sticks, pinching little mounds of sticky dense paste made from crushed mango, fragrant oils and citronella, and rolling them onto sticks, before Ganyaborn takes them away to dry in an oven.
It proves a hit, especially when I tell him they would make a good souvenir for his dad. Even more so, when he works out that this means more bahts to spend at the night market.
Spice Roads (+66 (0)2 712 5305, spiceroads. com) offers half-day cycle tours of Bang Kra Jao for 1,000 THB (£19) per person. Children 12-16 receive a 25% discount.
Leave a Reply
Ink Publishing 2010. All Rights Reserved