Downtown Bangkok sightseeing

If you are heading downtown from Banglamphu, allow at least an hour to get to any of the places mentioned here by bus. Depending on the time of day, it may be quicker to take an express boat downriver, and then change onto the Skytrain. It might also be worth considering the regular longtail on Khlong Saen Saeb, which runs parallel to Thanon Phetchaburi. They start at the Golden Mount, near Democracy Monument, and have useful stops at Saphan Hua Chang on Thanon Phrayathai (for Jim Thompson’s House) and Pratunam (for Erawan Shrine).

Jim Thomson’s House

Just off Siam Square at the north end of Soi Kasemsan 2, Thanon Rama I, and served by the National Stadium Skytrain station, Jim Thomson’s house (daily from 9am, viewing on frequent 30-40min guided tours in several languages, last tour 5pm; B100, students & under -25s B50) is a kind of Ideal Home in elegant Thai style, and a peaceful refuge from downtown kind of Ideal Home in elegant Thai style, and a peaceful refuge from downtown chaos. The house was the residence of the legendary American adventurer, entrepreneur, art collector and all-round character whose mysterious disappearance in the jingles of Malaysia in 1967 has made him even more of a legend among Thailand’s farang community.

Apart from putting together this beautiful home, Thompson’s most concrete contribution was to turn traditional silk-weaving from a dying art into a highly successful international industry its is today, The complex now includes a shop (closes 6pm), part of the Jim Thompson Thai Silk Company chain, above which a new gallery hosts temporary exhibitions on textiles and the arts, such as royal maps of Siam in the nineteenth century. There’s also an excellent bar-restaurant (last food orders 4.30pm), which serves a similar menu to Jim Thompson’s Slaladaeng Café. Ignore any con men at the entrance to the soi looking for mugs to escort on rip-off shipping trips; they will tell you that the house is closed when it isn’t.

The grand rambling house is in fact a combination of six teak houses, some from as far afield as Ayutthaya and most more than two hundred years old. Like all traditional houses, they were built in wall section hung together without nails on a frame of wooden pillars, which made it easy to dismantle them, pile them onto a barge and float them to their new location. Although he had trained as an architect, Thompson had more difficulty in putting them back together again: in the end, he had to go back to Ayutthaya to hunt down a group of carpenters who still practiced the old house-building methods. Thompson added a few unconventional touches of his own, incorporating the elaborately carved front wall of a Chinese pawnshop between the drawing room and the bedroom and reversing the other walls in the drawing room so that their carving faced into the room.

The impeccably tasteful interior has been left as it was during Thompson’s life, even down to the cutlery on the dining table. Complementing the fine artifacts from throughout Southeast Asia is a stunning array of Thai arts and crafts, including one of the best collections of traditional Thai paintings in the world. Thompson picked up plenty of bargains from the Thieves’ Quarter (Nakhon Kasem) in the Chinatown, before collecting Thai art become fashionable and expensive. Other pieces were liberated from decay and destruction in upcountry temples, while many of the Buddha images were turned over by ploughs, especially around Ayutthaya. Some of the exhibits are very rare, such as a headless but elegant seventh-century Dvaravati Buddha and a seventeenth-century Ayutthayan teak Buddha, but Thompson also bought pieces of little value and fakes simply for their looks – a shopping strategy that’s all the more sensible in the jungle of today’s Thai antiques trade.

After the guided tour, you are free to wander round the former rice barn and gardener’s and maid’s houses in the small garden, which display some gorgeous traditional Thai paintings and drawings, as well as small-scale statues and Chinese ceramics.

Siam Ocean World

Spreading over two spacious basement floors of the Siam Paragon Shipping centre on Thanon Rama I, Siam Ocean World is a highly impressive, Australian-built aquarium (daily 9am-10pm, last admission 9pm; B450, children between 80 and 120cm tall B280; audio guide B100). Despite the relatively high admission price, it gets packed at weekends and during holidays and there are often long queues for the twenty-minute glass-bottomed boat rides (B150(, which give a behind-the-scenes look at the aquarium’s workings. Among other outstanding features of this US$30-million development are an eight-meter-deep glass-walled tank, which displays the multi-colored variety of a coral reef drop-off to great effect, touch tanks for handling starfish, and a long, under-ocean tunnel where you can watch sharks and rays swimming over your head. In this global piscatorial display of around 400 species, locals such as the Mekong giant catfish and the Siamese tigerfish are not forgotten, while regularly, spaced touch-screen terminals allow you to glean further information in English about the creatures on view. Popular daily highlights include shark feeds, currently at 1.30pm and 5.30pm, and it’s even possible to dive with the sharks here, costing from B5300 for an experienced diver to B6600 for a first –timer.

The Erawan Shrine

For a glimpse of the variety and ubiquity of Thai religion, drop in on the Erawan Shrine (Saan Phra Prom in Thai), at the corner of Thanon Ploenchit and Thanon Rajdamri underneath Chit Lom Skytrain station. Remarkable as much for its setting as anything else, this shrine to Brahma, the ancient Hindu creation god, and Erawan, his elephant, squeezes in on one of the busiest and noisiest corners of modern Bangkok, in the shadow of the Grand Hyatt Erawan Hotel – whose existence is the reason for the shrine. When a string of calamities held up the building of the original hotel in the 1950s, spirit doctors were called in, who instructed the owners to build a new home for the offended local spirits: the hotel was then finished without further mishap. Ill fortune struck the shrine itself, however, in early 2006, when young, mentally disturbed, Muslim man smashed the Brahma statue to pieces with a hammer – and was then brutally beaten to death by an angry mob. It’s expected that an exact replica of the statue will quickly be installed, incorporating the remains of the old statue to preserve the spirit of the deity.

Be prepared for sensory overload here: the main structure shines with lurid glass of all colors and the overcrowded precinct around it is almost buried under scented garlands and incense candles. You might also catch a lackluster group of traditional dancers performing here to the strains of a small classical orchestra – worshippers hire them to give thanks for a stroke of good fortune. To increase their future chances of such good fortune, visitors buy a bird or two from the flocks incarcerated in cages here; the bird-seller transfers the requested number of captives to a tiny hand-held cage, from which the customer duly liberates the animals, thereby accruing merit. People set on less abstract rewards with invest in a lottery ticket from one of the physically handicapped sellers: they’re thought to be the luckiest you can buy.

Suan Pakkad Palace Museum

The Suan Pakkad Palace Museum (daily 9am-4pm; B100), five minutes’ walk from Phaya Thai Skytrain station , at 352-4 Thanon Sri Ayutthaya, stands on what was once a cabbage patch but is now one of the finest all periods is display in four groups of traditional wooden houses, which were transported to Bangkok from various parts of the country. You can either take a guided tour in English (free) or explore the loosely arranged collection yourself (a leaflet and bamboo fan are handed out at the ticket office and some of the exhibits are labeled). The attached Marsi Gallery, in the modern Chumbhot-Pantip Center of Arts on the east side of the garden, displays some interesting temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.

The highlight of Suan Pakkad is the renovated Lacquer Pavilion, across the reedy pond at the back of the grounds. Set on stilts, the pavilion is actually an amalgam of two eighteenth- or late-seventeenth-century temple buildings, a ho trai (library) and a ho khien (writing room), one inside the other, which were found between Ayutthaya and Bang Pa-In. The interior walls are beautifully decorated with gilt of black lacquer: the upper panels depict the life of the Buddha while the lower ones show scenes from the Ramayana. Look out especially for the grisly details in the tableau on the back wall, showing the earth goddess drowning the evil forces of Mara. Underneath are depicted some European dandies on horseback, probably merchants, whose presence suggests that the work was executed before the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767.

The carefully observed details of daily life and nature are skilful and lively, especially considering the restraints which the lacquering technique places on the artist, who has no opportunity for corrections or touching up. The design has to be punched into a piece of paper, which is then laid on the panel of black lacquer (a kind of plant resin); a small bag of chalk dust is pressed on top so that the dust penetrates the minute holes in the paper, leaving a line of dots on the lacquer to mark the pattern; a gummy substance is then applied to any background areas that are to remain black, before the whole surface is covered in microscopically thin squares of gold leaf; this sheets of blotting paper, sprinkled with water, are then laid over the panel, which when pulled off bring away the gummy substance and the unwanted pieces of gold leaf. This leaves the rest of the gold decoration in high relief against the black background.

Divided between house no.8 and then Ban Chiang Gallery in the Chumbhot-Pantip Center of Arts is a very good collection of elegant, whorled pottery Chumbhot, excavated from tombs at Ban Chiang, the major Bronze Age settlement in the northeast. Scattered around the rest of the museum are some attractive Thai and Khmer religious sculptures among an electric jumble of artifacts, including fine ceramics and some intriguing kiln-wasters, failed pots which have melted together in the kiln to form weird, almost rubbery piece of sculpture; an extensive collection of colorful papier-mâché khon masks; beautiful betel-nut sets; monks elegant ceremonial fans; and some rich teak carvings, including a 200-years-old temple door showing episodes from Sang Thong, a folk tale about a childless king and queen who discover a handsome son in a conch shell.

Patpong

Concentrated into a small area between the eastern ends of Thanon Silom and Thanon Suriwong, the neon-lit go-go bars of the Patpong district look like rides in a tawdry sexual Disneyland. In front of each bar, girls cajole passers-by with a lifeless sensuality while insistent touts proffer printed menu and photographs detailing the degradation on show. Inside, bikini-clad women gyrate to Western music and play hostess to the (almost exclusively male) spectators; upstairs live shows feature women who, to use Spalding Gray’ phrase in Swimming to Cambodia, “do everything with their vaginas excepts have babies”.

Patpong was no more than a sea of mud when the capital was founded on the marshy river blank to the west, but by the 1960s had grown into a flash district of nightclubs and dance halls for rich Thais, owned by a Chinese millionaire godfather who gave his name to the area. In 1969, and American entrepreneur turned and existing teahouse into a luxurious nightclubs to satisfy the tastes of soldiers on R&R trips from Vietnam and so Patpong’s transformation into a Western Sex reservation began. At first, the area was rough and violent but over the years it has wised up to the desires of the affluent farang, and now markets itself as a packaged concept of Oriental decadence. The centre of the skin trade lies along the interconnected sois of Patpong 1 and 2, where lines of go-go bars share their patch with respectable restaurants, a 24-hour supermarket and an overabundance of pharmacies. By night, it’s a thumping theme park, whose blazing neon promises tend towards self-parody, with names like Thigh Bar and Chicken Divine. Budget travelers, purposeful businessmen and noisy lager louts thong the streets and even the most demure tourists – of both sexes – turn out to do some shopping at the night market down the middle of Patpong 1, where hawkers sell replica watches, bags and designer T-shirts. By day, a relaxed hangover descends on the place. Bar girls hang out at footstalls and cafes in respectable dress, often recognizable by faces with heavy makeup and beautiful slim tattooed bodies. Farang men slump at the bars on Patpong 2, drinking and watching videos, unable to find anything else to do in the whole Bangkok.

The small dead-end alley to the east of Patpong 2, Silom 4, hosts some of Bangkok’s hippest nightlife, its bars, clubs and pavements heaving at weekends with the capital’s bright young things. Several gay venues can be found on Silom 4, but the focus on the scene has shifted to Silom 2, while in between, Thanon Thaniya hostess bars and restaurants cater to Japanese tourists.

M.R Kukrit’s Heritage Home

Ten minutes’ walk south of Thanon Sathorn and twenty minutes from Chong Nonsi Skytrain station, at 19 Soi Phra Pinit (Soi 7, Thanon Narathiwat Ratchanakharin), lies M.R Kukrit’s Heritage Home, the beautiful traditional house and gardens of one of Thailand’s leading figures of the twentieth century (Baan Mom Kukrit; Sat, San & public holidays 10am-5pm; B50). M.R (Mom Rajawongse, a princely title) Kukrit Pramoj (1911-95) was a remarkable all-rounder descended from Rama II on his father’s side and on his mother’s side, from the influential ministerial family, the Bunnags. Kukrit graduated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and went on to become a university lecturer back in Thailand, but his greatest claim to fame is probably as a writer: he founded , owned and penned daily column for Siam Rath, the most influential Thai-language newspaper, and wrote short stories, novels, plays and poetry. He was also a respected performer in classical dance-drama (khon), and he starred as an Asian prime minister, opposite Marlon Brando, in the Hollywood film, The Ugly American. In 1974, during an especially turbulent period for Thailand, life imitated art, when Kukrit was called on to become Thailand’s PM at the head of a coalition of seventeen parties. However, just four hundred days into his premiership, the Thai military leadership dismisses him for being too anti-American.

The residence, which has been left just as it was when Kukrit was alive, reflects his complex character. In the large, open-sided sala (pavilion) for public functions near the entrance is an attractive display of khon masks, including a gold one which Kukrit wore when he played the demon king, Totsagan (Ravana). In and around the adjoining Khmer-styled garden, keep your eyes peeled for the mai dut, sculptured miniature trees similar to bonsai, some of which Kukrit worked on for decades. The living quarters beyond are made up of five teak houses on stilts, assembled from various parts of central Thailand and joined by an open veranda. The bedroom, study and various sitting rooms are decked out with beautiful objects d’art; look out especially for the carved bed that belonged to Rama II and the very delicate, 200-years-old nielloware (gold inlay) form Nakhon Si Thamarat in the formal reception room. In the small family prayer room, Kukrit Pramoj’s ashes are enshrined in the base of a reproduction of the Emerald Buddha.

Ban Kamthieng (Kamthieng House)

Another reconstructed traditional Thai residence, Ban Kamthieng (Tues-Sat 9am-5pm) was moved in the 1960s from Chiang Mai to 131 Thanon Asok Montri (Soi21), off Thanon Sukhumvit and set up as an ethnological museum by the Siam Society. The delightful complex of polished teak buildings make a pleasing oasis beneath the towering glass skyscrapers that dominate the rest of Sukhumvit and is easily reached from the Asok Skytrain and Sukhumvit subway stops. It differs from Suan Pakkad, Jim Thompson’s House and M.R Kukrit’s Heritage Home in being the home of a rural family, and the object on display give a fair insight into country life for the well-heeled in northern Thailand.

The house was built on the banks of Ping River in the mid-nineteenth century and the ground-level display of farming tools and fish traps evokes the upcountry practice of fishing in flooded rice paddies to supplement the supply from the rivers. Upstairs, the main display focuses on the ritual life of a typical Lanna household, explaining the role of the spirits, the practice of making offerings and the belief in talismans, magic shirts and male tattoos. The rectangular lintel above the door is a hum yon, carved in floral patterns the present testicles and designed to ward off evil spirits. Walk along the open veranda to the authentically equipped kitchen to see a video lesson in making spicy frog soup and to the granny to find an interesting exhibition on the ritual practices associated with rice-farming.