For our last day in Bangkok on this leg of the trip, we kept it simple. We didn’t leave our hotel room until noon when we returned to the awesome Krua Khun Puk restaurant around the corner where we’d enjoyed our first meal in Bangkok on day 1. This place rocks! It’s open from 8am until 4am, 7 days a week, serving up delicious Thai food that’s enjoyed by locals, tourists and expats alike. After sipping on a coconut juice and passion fruit smoothie, we dug into a Phad Kra Prao Gai (chicken with basil, chilies and garlic), a very tasty rice with pineapple, shrimp, raisins and cashews, and some stir fried beef with chili peppers.
After lunch, we hired a tuk-tuk to take us to Lumphini Park, another one of Bangkok’s amazing huge green spaces in the heart of the city. The park is located not too far from Benjakitti Park. In fact, there’s a walkway called the Green Mile Bridge that connects the two. Sprawling across 142 acres, Lumphini is characterized by a central lake and beautiful trees. It was the first public park in Bangkok and is a popular place for people to exercise and do Tai Chi.
Lumphini Park is also home to many giant monitor lizards and I saw my first one only minutes after we’d arrived. It was quite a large lizard, about four or five feet long and it was completely unfazed by my presence.
The park offers swan-shaped paddle boats, as well as kayaks, that you can take out onto the lake… for free! I’d read that you can buy bread on-site to feed to Terrapin turtles in the lake but it wasn’t until we were out on the water paddling one of the swans that I realized that we’d forgotten the bread! We paddled upside a couple of other swans and asked about where to get the bread but no one seemed to know what we were talking about. Oh well.
We hopped into our fourth tuk-tuk—now veterans of this awesome form of transportation—and headed back to the hotel for some poolside lounging with a coconut juice and a couple of cold Chang beers for me. The pool area’s verdant garden and cityscape views make it a really nice place to relax, and the staff are all so friendly and kind.
For dinner, we opted for room service since we had to pack for tomorrow’s journey south (a detailed and time consuming undertaking.) We’ll be picked up at 6:40am and head to Suvarnabhumi (BKK) airport for our 1hr 30min flight to Krabi. Bangkok has been a blast, we both really like this awesome city, and we’ll be returning for another two nights in a few weeks before flying home to Canada. Next up: Koh Lanta!