Ok so I don’t actually know what the going price is for tuk tuk and taxi rides as a local, but it’s ridiculous how much people raise the prices for foreigners. Every time we took a ride that wasn’t metered, I would haggle down our ride price to half or a third of the original price. Granted in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money extra charged really isn’t that much in the US, and its not that big a deal, but I realized I love haggling not only because it’s fun, but because the locals will end up talking to you about other things as well.
We didn’t have a set time today for when we wanted to leave for Pattaya, so we decided to just walk around exploring temples (and obvi the Grand Palace) until we were tired and wanted to peace out. Amy, E (a girl from Brazil that we met), and I headed out early morning to hit up the Grand Palace. On the way there, we were approached by several people.
The first time, we had no idea what was going on. A lady approached us asking us if we were going to the grand palace, and pointed us in the right direction. She then said however, that it was better to go at 11, that we were too early, and that it would be better for us to go see the temples along the river instead. She then proceeded to take our map, show us which port to go from, and say that a long tail boat ride like that, taking us to temples and the floating market, would only cost 900 baht a person (yea, “only”). She flagged down a tuk tuk and told us 15 baht to go to this port, he will take you right now, then walked away. There was a really awkward point where Amy was ready to get in the tuk tuk, but E and I were pretty skeptical, not only because the price was expensive, but because we had heard about people getting stopped. The driver kept saying 15 baht I take you now, so I finally told him sorry and said that we should just go to the grand palace. It was only 5 minutes away, and if it was really closed (which I doubted) there were other places within walking distance that we could visit first.
Good thing we walked away, because by the time we reached the entrance of the Grand Palace, two other people had approached us to try to tell us the same thing, and we knew that it must be a scam of some sort. We grabbed some breakfast (we had delicious beef ball noodle soup, but E thought that was weird and grabbed a pastry and coffee next door instead), pulled on our long sleeve coverups, and headed in.
Tip – there’s no need to hire a guide at the entrance. We were told it would only be 600 baht for the three of us to have a guide, but once we entered the palace, we found a place to sign up for free tours.
We took a pretty extensive tour of the Grand Palace (entry ticket is 500 baht), where our tour guide started out giving an overview of the royal family, how the palace is divided into three sections, and the religious history behind the temples. As we walked through the temples, he told us the stories represented by the wall paintings, the meaning of the statues, and all sorts of fun facts about temples changing colors, the reasoning behind why they were built, and who ordered what to be done. After the temples came the political areas, such as the coronation room, the throne room (with an explanation of the 7 level umbrella), and more. We then walked through the weapons museum and the textile museum (located just outside the palace, but still within the walls). After two hours, we were outside the walls, happily stripping off the extra clothes, and on our way to the Temple of Dawn.
There is a ferry that takes you across the river for 3 baht, next to the dock for the public boat that takes you down the river. We crosses over and explored the temple (50 baht entrance fee, and you need to cover up Grand Palace style). It was a gorgeous temple, very intricate paintwork and carvings, and you can go up to the third level (which involved one set of steep stairs and one set of really steep stairs). You get a great view of the river and city at the top.
We decided that we were all temples out after this, so we ran along the river side, trying to figure out how to take the public boat to sampeng, and failing miserably. We did see plenty of advertisements for private boat tours though! We finally gave up, took the ferry back across the river, and flagged down a tuk tuk to take us.
(We did a spot of haggling with the driver, where he complained to us that we were being unreasonable considering the traffic and such. When we brought up the 15 baht price from this morning, he explained to us the system of commission that drivers get around that area (taking you to shopping and boat rides means tuk tuk drivers get a percentage of the commission, typically up to about 1000 baht. He also said that if we really had wanted the boat ride, it should only be 500 a person, not 900). We finally agreed on a price (80 baht from his original 200, and also much less than the 250 taxi drivers were trying to charge us without meter), got in, hit some disgusting traffic, and reached Sampeng market near Chinatown after way too much time breathing in car fumes around us.
We ran around the market a bit, which is just your typical market of random goods and not too special (though it was quite expansive). Our tummies forced is to pick up random food along the way, so we sampled the pomegranate juice, fried fish balls (that look like dumplings and are delicious with chili sauce), banana leaf wrapped sticky rice, and finally some KFC (I know, real adventurous). Afterwards, we headed back to the hostel to pick up our bags and taxi to the Eastern Ekkamai Bus Terminal (about 120 baht and one hour in heavy traffic).
We got lost a little bit when we saw Ekkamai and ran upstairs first to the train station, but we eventually found the terminal, picked up our tickets (you get to choose your seat), and hopped on our way to Pattaya. The ride itself is about 2.5 hours, and was actually pretty comfortable. We ended at North Pattaya Bus Terminal, took a shared taxi out and found our way to our hostel.
Tip – the shared taxis in Pattaya are pretty much hop on hop off, starting at about 10 baht a person for short distances and going up to about 30 baht from walking street to the bus terminal. Taxis go one way along Beach St towards Walking Street (along the beach), and the opposite direction on 2nd St, a block or so up from the shore.
A little exploring of Walking Street (where our hostel was located near) showed us that food options were low and booze/boob options were many. All the bars had girls screaming out to men passing by, and skimpily dressed people walked around in hordes. Our taxi driver in Bangkok had absolutely been right when he said Pattaya was no good, all far Russian and Indian people there. Amy finally got a kebab, while I had kiwi ice cream for dinner, and after enough shuddering from seeing old fat men with young Asian chickadees on their arms, we hopped into a 7-11 for better food options and headed home.