Yesterday (3/31) we visited the Grand Palace and several Wats (temples) in the center of Bangkok. The last few days here have been sunny and HOT (starting at 90 and getting up to the high 90s and sometimes low 100s). So we geared up for the sun and then headed to the attractions. We decided to take a tuk tuk, just for the experience. Tuk tuk’s in Bangkok are even more silly and crazy than in other parts of Thailand, you can get a sense in the picture below. The bellman at the hotel negotiated with the driver to get a good rate of 100 baht (about 3 dollars). This ended up being quite a good deal since it was a 40 minute (hair raising) ride.
We arrived at the Grand Palace compound, bought our tickets and started by going into the royal coin and jewel museum. This seemed like it was going to be interesting, and the sky was a bright grey – too bright for good pictures – so we thought 30 minutes might improve the conditions. As we were nearly done with the coin museum (which was interesting, but I won’t remember it since we couldn’t take photos) we started hearing a noise – then Sam said “I think that’s rain.”
It was rain, all right. Rain like I’ve rarely – if ever – seen in my life. In the 30ish minutes we were inside the museum, the sky turned from clear grey to torrential thunderstorms. We tried to wait it out in the museum, but after 30 or 40 minutes, we finally decided to make a run for one of the wats, the entrance of which was only 30 feet away. Here, in a square covered walkway that surrounded the temple itself, we sheltered for another hour and watched with amazement as nature overpowered the sewer system.
Eventually the rain stopped, but not before it filled the square in the middle of the temple to a depth of more than 10 inches… watching the water rise was surreal. Check out some of the pictures below.
We laughed pretty hard at this. Those of you who have been following along on our trip will understand part of the reason – it seems every major monument we’ve gone to we’ve either brought fog or rain. The other reason for our amusement was that the night before we watched the movie Evan Almighty at the hotel, a comedy about a modern day Noah and his Ark. So it seemed especially appropriate, and amusing. Needless to say, we didn’t get the postcard perfect pictures you can imagine, but we got some really wacky pictures of the palace and temples during and after the rain.
It was also amusing seeing people navigate the flooded terrain. It took about 3 hours after the rain stopped before the sewers had caught up and drained the area. Check out some of the more interesting pictures of people below.
After we visited the Emerald Buddha (very cool but again, no photos), the skies cleared and we moved on to the Grand Palace itself. A striking building… and funny little guards who stand at attention without moving. I can only imagine how funny it would have been to take pictures of them during the rain. And they are probably about 6 feet tall, when they are standing on their pedestal. 
Of course, the machine guns made them slightly less comical.
After the Grand Palace, we walked across the street to Wat Pho, the home of the reclining Buddha. On our way their we passed several “wily strangers” who tried to convince us that Wat Pho lay in the opposite direction – presumably they had some scam in mind. At one point, Sam responded to one of them with the exclamation “shame on you!” That’s my girl.
Inside Wat Pho they allowed us to take pictures, so there’s a small chance that I will actually remember this place. The reclining Buddha is truly awesome… hundreds of feet long and it basically fills the main temple nearly to bursting. Behind the Buddha are 108 little pots, for 20 baht you get a little container with 108 little coins that you can drop one in each pot. I couldn’t resist. I have no idea of the significance, for all I know I was praying for a good season of crops in my garden.
As we left the main temple and wandered around the grounds, the water was still fairly deep in places and made for some interesting shots of the temple’s grounds, as you can see below.
With all the rain, not the day we imagined, but we had a great time nonetheless. We got a particular kick out of seeing the sights like few other tourists have.
One interesting thing we found out is that there are about 27,000 temples in Thailand. I’m not up for visiting all of them, but next time we’re in Thailand I would like to see a few more. Another interesting fact is that a temple has to have a minimum of 8 monks to perform all the duties, and of course many temples have dozens of monks. So there are a bare minimum of 216,000 monks in Thailand, and probably quite a few more. Thailand has a population of 63 million, so that means more than 1 in 300 people is a monk. If the U.S. had a comparable percentage, we would have more than a million monks. It explains how common a sight monks were throughout our travels.
Here are the rest of the photos from our last day in Bangkok…
