The Floating Market

One of Bangkok's unique cultural experiences are the floating markets. Vendors in large straw hats sit perched in long wooden boats crowded together selling produce, wares, and even cooking meals from their narrow boats.

Taling Chan market is where our group is headed, in Thonburi, a twenty minute taxi ride from downtown. It's a blazing hot day in which we are persistently plagues by beads of sweat. Fortunately, there's much to catch our interest. We purchase mangosteen and strange red shiny pepper fruits and share in each of our crazy finds. There's a wild orgy of catfish near the market vendors, where thousands of angry foot-long catfish flop at the water's surface in mostly vain attempts to munch the hunks of bread being thrown into the river by Japanese children here on vacation with their family. There are tubs of tiny turtles and writhing snakes, we assume waiting to be fried up and served as food. We indulge in a few large coral crayfish, dipping them in a very spicy salsa verde. We order pork kabobs, five for 20 Baht, from a boat vendor who cooks them over hot coals in his boat! When the kabobs are done he tosses them in a red pail which is then raised via a rope to the boardwalk. The kabobs are mixed with a peanut sauce and tossed in a small, neat plastic bag, like almost all street vendor food in Thailand.

After wandering the boat vendors and eating enough for two families, we decide to book a one-hour boat ride up the river to see some of the countryside. A colorful longboat is packed to the gills with tourists, cameras at the ready, and we are shoved into a narrow seat space which none of us can fit into without turning our knees at a 45 degree angle. The boat is amply powered by a Toyota V6 and we shoot up the canal with running commentary in Thai, we asse about the views, or history of long boating. It could well have been a detailed account of his sister's aching love life for all we know.

The trip is well worth the pain in your backside from the cramped space and hard seats. The canal is lined with green grasses, towering coconut trees, mangroves, and colonies of floating houses. The river is larger than we thought, with "streets" and intersections and even neighborhoods. Old women sit in their boats making fish cakes, young women work on the dock washing a pile of dishes by hand from a big black tub, and monks teach the younger monks to scrub temple walls until they gleam white in the summer sun.

The sights and smells of Old Bangkok can be richly felt out here at the floating market and we are lucky to have tasted it.