The Tuk Tuk tour.

November 22, 2009, Tour #2 – The Tuk Tuk tour. Bangkok Subways, Tuk Tuks, Buddhist Temples, The Amulet Market, The Wholesale flower market, The public university, the street market and navigating our way back to the hotel.
Today’s adventure starts out with us trying to locate the Lamphoung central train station where we are supposed to meet our guide who will guide us through the sites of Bangkok on three wheeled scooter called Tuk tuks ( pronounced touk touk). We could either take the taxi there and risk getting stuck in a traffic jam (which is all too common in Bangkok), or take the subway and pick the correct line, platform and destination. Keep in mind that our Thai is a little rusty if not nonexistent, but the average berson can mutter out a few words of English so we thought we would choose the subway and try it.
We arrived at the central train station without a hitch, just like a bunch of old travelling pros and sought out to meet our guide for the day Mr. Betong, (Mr B for short). Mr. B. was trained as a Buddhist monk for the past 13 years and chose to leave monastic life to find a job and support his ailing parents who are too old to continue to farm. Once his obligations are over he intends to return to the monastery as a teacher and spiritual guide. His background made the tours of the temples a little more interesting as he could really dive into the subject matter. For those of you who are like me and don’t know a lot about Buddhism, I found out that Buddhism is a faith that is centered around behaviour and consequences and rewards. If you were good and charitable and faithful in a previous life you would be blessed in your next life and so forth. You would continue to return to the earth until you had achieved the 9 levels of spiritual enlightenment. Aside from reincarnation, they believe in living a life prescribed by a similar 10 commandments. One thing that differs greatly in Buddhism versus any of the monotheistic religions such as Jewish, Christianity or Muslim, is their great reliance on luck and amulets that bring on luck and ward off evil. The high use of these symbols is a throwback from the Hindu faith and their 10,000 gods and symbols. Similarly, the Hindu spirit house has also been incorporated into Thai Buddhism. Located on every property is a spot where the spirits are strongest as determined by the local community of Buddhist monks. A spirit house is then build on that spot before any other construction can take place and everyday they must burn incense in the spirit house and give an offering of flowers, food and coins to make the spirits happy and help them meet their requirements in spirit world. Weird but interesting all the same. The Thai people are perhaps the universally most spiritual people that we have ever encountered. They are generally very peaceful and pure of heart.
We found Mr. B and went out to climb aboard our tuk tuks. Tracie and Lizzie, Nicholas and I , Christopher and Emily and Stan and Mr. B teamed up as you could comfortably fit 2 passengers in a tuk tuk (that is not to say that we didn’t see families of 7 riding in one but the operative word here was comfortably. Tuk tuks are a really fun and affordable way to get around in Bangkok. Put is on one of your top things to do if you get here. We quickly set off to the white fort on the river bank of the Po river and then went to the amulet market located in the courtyard of a monestary. We then took off to the largest reclining Buddha in the world made out of solid gold. What was fascinating about this Buddha was that it was it was built in 1750 by the King Rama 5 for 50 million dollars when gold was only 5 British pounds for an ounce. Today, gold is over $1000 per ounce which means that the cost to build this Buddha today would be about 300 times its original cost which means that it would be 1.5 Billion dollars worth of Gold.