 |
Thailand
2006 Transportation |
Main Travel
Page Main Thailand Page |
 Many trips begin with a long plane flight. Thankfully, on a fantastic plane like the Boeing 747, even a sixteen-hour flight goes pretty quickly. This was my plane for my final flight from Tokyo back to Chicago. |
 Thailand has a public bus company that goes all around the country. It is cheap, reliable, and efficient. This is the north-bound bus station in Bangkok. I am getting ready to leave for Sukhothai. |
 Inside the bus, on the way from Chiang Mai back to Bangkok. |
 This is the same bus as the picture above. MTV Thailand or something like that was playing on the television. It was the same woman singing for about four hours. On this bus there was a lady who brought around food and drinks every so often. That made up for the TV! |
 I took the train from Bangkok to Ayuthaya. After it pulled into the station, these two guys started washing the windows. This is Hualumphong station in Chinatown, Bangkok's main train station. |
 As you can see, a lot of tourists are taking the short ride up to Ayuthaya. |
 This was taken from my hotel room. If you look closely in the center of the picture you can see the Sky Train. There was a station about five minutes from my hotel, which made getting around pretty easy. The Sky Train doesn't go to the older parts of the city, but you can take the Sky Train to the river and then take boats from there. |
 The Sky Train got pretty busy at peak times, as hordes of young Thais descended on the shopping malls that were connected to the Sky Train station at Siam Square in central Bangkok. |
 Even when it's busy, the Thai people remain polite and restrained. You can see here that everybody gets in line to get into the Sky Train car. |
 This is a one of the Chao Phraya River Express boats that goes up and down the river. Several people are wearing yellow shirts, which are to show support for their king, who was in the hospital. |
 Here is a map of Bangkok to give you an idea of how the river is used for transportation. The thin reddish line (not the thick purple one) is the Sky Train. The Sky Train connects to the river in the south-west corner of the map and all the blue spots on the river are places where the boat stops. There are also lots of ferries that just cross the river, if you need to get to the other side. The red dot is my hotel. Click here for a bigger version of the map. |
 This is a cross-river ferry, which I took to get to Wat Arun, on the other side of the river. That is Wat Arun in the background. A Wat is a Buddhist temple. |
 In addition to the Chao Phraya River, there are many smaller canals that run through Bangkok. These boats go through the canals, which is also a good way to get around. No stoplights! |
 This is inside one of the canal boats. The blue material is to keep the exceptionally dirty water from splashing onto the passengers. |
 This is a sawng-thaew, basically—as you can see—a pick-up truck with a place for passengers to sit in the back. As far as I know, this is the cheapest way to get around in Thailand. For most rides around a city, you only pay 10 or 20 baht, which is 30 to 50 cents. Some of the sawng-thaews have their destinations written on the windshield. Sometimes you have to ask the driver where he is headed. If you want to ride, you just climb in the back and pay when you get off. |
 This is in the back of a sawng-thaew in Sukhothai, which I took from my hotel to the Sukhothai Historical Park. The person on the left is a tourist from Japan. The basket belongs to a lady who was riding with us. We stopped at her house, and we all helped her get her stuff off the truck. |
 This shot is looking out of a sawng-thaew, somewhere around Sukhothai. |
 I took the bus from Sukhthai up
to Chiang Mai. I didn't want to wait an extra hour for the fancy bus to
leave, so I took the cheap bus. It was just fine—another
lesson in the value of money—that
often less is more!
|
 This is the famous Tuk-Tuk, called saamlaw by the Thais. Basically it's a motorcycle with three wheels. For a Tuk-Tuk ride, you have to negotiate a price before you go. Bargaining hard is recommended. |
 And finally, at the bottom of the transportation food chain, is the bicycle. I rented this bike at the Sukhothai Historical Park for about fifty-five cents for the day. Many of the sites at the park are spread out pretty far, so walking isn't a very good option. With the bike, I could explore the countryside a little bit as well as get around to all the major ruins. |
