Thailand’s Many Faces

Cox & Kings provided the perfect guide: Vee, a charming woman with an endearing sense of humor and untiring enthusiasm. Though an excellent English speaker, we taught her a new word, “adorable,” which she truly was.

We stayed first at the storied Mandarin Oriental Hotel—where authors from Joseph Conrad to Noel Coward hung out—then, after two nights, we crossed the Chao Phraya River to the Peninsula Bangkok. These two are among the most stunning and pampering hotels in Asia.

Each morning we breakfasted upon a riverside terrace, and were ready promptly for our early calls with Vee.

As is the way with travel to exotic countries, just the car ride to a well-known site can be as exciting as the final destination. Stirring scenes of Thai daily life included ghostly white figures with face masks mining salt in endless paddies by the roadside; groups of saffron-robed monks receiving their daily bread (literally; Thai citizens are required to provide monks with all their food); elderly ladies squatting by the road frying up coconut pancakes and filleting fresh fish; water buffalo grazing in fields.

We took a long-tailed speedboat to visit the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market, where merchants (usually women) paddle the congested network of canals in sturdy canoes laden with fresh fruit, vegetables, and conical hats to sell to shoppers on the banks and in other canoes.

On a cruise along the Chao Phraya, which divides Bangkok in half, we saw daily life in homes lining the riverbank, from the simple to the elegant. We trekked through the expansive Grand Palace, the ancient Siamese court where the Kings of Siam once dwelled, and where the lit-up golden rooftops make a spectacular nighttime sight.

We walked the haunting ruins of Ayutthaya, capital of Siam from 1350 through 1767, when it was burned during a war with Burma. Some still-thriving wats (temples) we visited held golden or emerald Buddhas and were paved over with the distinctive pottery mosaics seen nowhere else.

We watched performances of Thai music and classical dance, rode an elephant through a rubber plantation, visited the Chatuchak Weekend market—with 15,000 stalls on 35 acres—selling everything from silks to jade to clothing to puppies. (I just wish I could have figured out a way to bring home vast quantities of the fabulous gold-painted china several stalls were selling.)

But our gold lust was sated in Chinatown, a section of Bangkok teeming with tiny three-wheeled tuk-tuks (a Thai taxi, if you will), autos, food peddlers, and pedestrians from the world over. There are seemingly hundreds of cheek-by-jowl shops selling gold jewelry, and each looks exactly like the next. The Chinese here work only in 23-karat gold, the most precious anywhere.

But truly the most precious? The memories made in faraway lands.