WARNING : Long and Photo intensive.

Saturday was the day we decided to see the other two Wats that were on my list. There are many, many Wats in Bangkok, actually the largest concentration in all of SE Asia but we can only handle so many before we got ‘Watted’ out. It’s seems that 4 was our limit. We weren’t really in any rush this morning so went to hunt out some breakfast. Found a nice little restaurant on one of the main side streets.

I saw that they had a fruit plate that sounded perfect and the menu picture looked delicious. The picture showed a variety of exotic fruits including dragon fruit which is abundant here. What I got was nothing like the picture and way over priced. I could have bought this from a street vendor for a fraction of the price. Plus our hotel gives free bananas.

Doug ordered a full breakfast and realized too late that the waitress never asked how he wanted his eggs cooked. He had wanted an omelette but got barely cooked fried eggs. The ‘sausages’ were mini hotdog wieners.

After breakfast we walked across the street to have a look in the 7 Eleven store. There seems to be one every couple of hundred feet. Found a few interesting products. You have to be aware of what you buy here as many of their products have skin whitening ingredients in them.

Now it was time to get a tuk-tuk to take us to our first Wat of the day as it was almost 5 km away and too far to walk to start the day off. I ended up doing over 16,000 steps today even with taking the tuk-tuk. The hotel had told us a tuk-tuk should cost about 150 baht to go there. The driver quoted us 500 baht (approximately $20 Cdn). Do we have ‘SUCKERS’ written on our foreheads? We told him what the hotel told us. After lots of negotiations we settled on 200 baht even though he wanted 250. We did give him 250 baht which included his tip. He was very happy.

First up was Wat Traimit, Temple of the Golden Buddha. We had to have covered shoulders and no knees showing. Have I mentioned it was HOT? I was melting with all this clothing on!

This should say Please take off shoes

From here you could see what I think is the start of China town or maybe we were already in China town. We’ll never know.

Then I spied what is turning into my little piece of heaven. Back home I’ve never been a fan of Starbucks but over in Asia it is a precious sight. Since my breakfast hadn’t filled me we went in to grab an iced coffee when I saw this delicious, scrumptious ham and cheese crescent. You have no idea how good it was.

Next up was our 2nd Wat of the day, Wat Pho, Temple of the Reclining Buddha. As it was only a couple of kilometres away we decided to walk. We plotted our route using maps.me. Well maps.me apparently likes to take you through all the tourist busiest routes available. Every street we went on seemed to specialize in one item. This street was shoes. Shoes as far as you could see.

Saw lots of

It had us going through a very narrow covered market. There had to have been a million people in there as well as close to a thousand degrees.

We finally said enough was enough and escaped on the next available street. Good thing maps.me works like Miss Garmin and will recalculate your route. After what seemed like an insane amount of time to go 2 km we finally reached our destination Wat Pho.

This place was huge and pictures will never do it justice. Here are a few of the hundreds that I took.

There are orchids everywhere and they are spectacular

Inside the main temple is where the Reclining Buddha lays. He is massive.

We were tired and hot and ready to get back to our hotel. This didn’t turn out to be a very easy task. We wanted to take a tuk-tuk back, but none of the tuk-tuk drivers seemed to know where our hotel was. Not sure what their problem was as it’s in a very busy part of Old Bangkok which is very popular and not that far from the temple. Next we tried a taxi since we figured they would have a GPS of some sort. That wasn’t successful either. Someone, won’t mention any names here, but you know who you are, had told us to always make sure the taxi uses their meter otherwise they will rip you off. Well the taxi driver refused and just walked away. We gave up and decided to just walk the couple of kilometres back to the hotel. This would have been fine in cooler weather but it was HOT and SUNNY! At 5:00 pm it was 42C (108F) with the humidity. We finally made it back and have now decided that some days it will just be worth it to pay what they ask for and skip the meter issue. After a cool rest we headed out for dinner in an obviously touristy restaurant. No locals here but were the Blue Hawaiian drinks ever good!