Sounded interesting enough, so why not. Plus when you do these sort of canned touristy tours, it's a good way to meet some other travelers. So, at 7am that morning, I stood outside of my guest house and waited for the van to come pick me up. And waited, and waited, and waited...to the point I was starting to think they either forgot about me, got my guest house mixed up, or had come a few minutes early before I was standing outside. Finally, around 7:45 a flustered looking Thai guy approached me and said a few things which I couldn't understand but assumed this was my guy. Voucher in hand, I showed it to him and he directed me toward a van parked down the road. I entered the van, crammed with about 12 other passengers and did my little awkward hello directed toward no one in particular and found a seat next to a nice Italian couple. We sat there for a few minutes, still parked, making polite conversation when some Thai girl flung the door open and ordered us out. Confused and a little annoyed we exited the van and were directed toward a different van parked in front of us. So in we went, for a few minutes until we were again ordered out and back into the original van. Ok, seriously? More confusion ensued as they began trying to sort out who had booked the full day tour to both the floating markets and tiger temple and / or the half day tour to just the floating markets. In very broken English. This whole operation was a mess, but eventually we got things sorted out and were on our way at around 8:30. So annoying. However the whole debacle provided plenty of comedic material to get the jokes and conversation flowing amongst the group, which turned out to be pretty cool. I'll also add that I found it a bit odd and somewhat of a pleasant surprise to be the only American in the group.
After about a 90 minute drive, we arrived at some docks and were directed toward a series of funny looking boats, which would take us to the markets. They were like no boats I had ever seen - really long and skinny with a little prop motor attached to a long pole which swiveled, in order to allow the driver to steer us around. The boats were painted up in real bright gaudy colors and looked really fun. I excitedly hopped on board for what turned out to be the highlight of the floating market experience...getting there lol. Check it out!
Really fun! After about a 20 minute ride we arrived at the floating markets. Which was a bit of a dissapointment. First off, they were not actually floating, it was just a series of canals below a bunch of massive raised concrete platforms. And after a few minutes of exploring, it was clear that this was more of a tourist trap than anything else. Hoping to find some cool authentic merchandise, it was mostly more of the same tourist tchotchkes, one stall after another, with little variation between them. The markets consisted of hundreds of stalls, but I felt like if you scoped out 10 stalls, you probably saw everything. With so many sellers, you would think they would try to differentiate themselves by selling something different but instead its a competition of who can haggle the hardest as you're walking by. Oh well, it was still a fun experience, and I did get these classy pics out of it:
 |
| Wasn't expecting that one! |
:P
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment