Better in Bangkok

This is part three of a five part round the world trip.

• Cruising to the Old World
• Istanbul not Constantinople
• Better in Bangkok
• Killing Time in Kuantan
• Sunny in Sydney

This segment starts with me leaving Istanbul. The original plan had been to go to Baku Azerbaijan, but the Iran War forced me to change all of my plans. After a lot of searching, I found some Thai Airways flights to Bangkok and this post will focus mostly on my time there.

Getting to the Istanbul Airport was quite a journey from my hotel in Old Town Istanbul. It took about two hours to get there via the metro. Security at the airport was pretty easy and as a Thai Airways business class traveller, I had access to Turkish Airways lounge which was quite nice. 

This was within the first two weeks of the Iran War and with Middle East airspace closed, virtually all the award availability was gone. Between that war, Ukraine to the north and Pakistan bombing Afghanistan, what had been one of the best connected cities in the world felt remarkably constrained.

Eventually, I found business class availability on Thai Airways to Bangkok. Strangely, this one flight often had four seats available. I suspect it was just a route that a lot ofhe points and miles people just didn't want to fly at the time. 

While researching the route, I used sites like SafeAirSpace.net to convince myself it should be safe. The flight headed east flying south of Ukraine and Russia, roughly fifty miles north of Iran before cutting across Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a sad feeling, to see so much war in the world and to find yourself threading the needle between so many conflicts.

In Afghanistan, there is no air traffic control. Instead, there are a few safety corridors through the country and commercial flights maintain longitudinal spacing and lock their altitude upon entering the region. Afghanistan is not generally believed to have anti-aircraft capable of taking down a jetliner so, even during a conflict, there is relatively low risk of a mistake.

The flight itself was very nice with excellent service and food. I actually had Wifi for a chunk of the flight and was able to track our progress the whole way. It was a little sad to see myself overflying Baku, the city I'd planned to visit. And it was definitely nerve racking, flying so close to Ukraine, Russia and Iran.

Once I landed I took an expensive cab to my hotel. There is a train you can take to north of the city center, but there was no train from there to near my hotel on the river, and at this point it was about 9am and I hadn't slept yet.

Most of my time in Bangkok was divided between these areas:

• Old Town
• The Chao Phraya River 
• City Center

Although I'd been to Bangkok a couple years before, almost everything there was entirely new to me.

My cab dropped me off directly at my hotel, after a 30-40 minute drive from the airport. Unfortunately, the hotel was solidly booked and didn't have any rooms available and didn't expect any for a couple hours. So I dropped my luggage off and headed to the Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaew, aka the Temple of the Emerald Buddha

Built in the late 18th century, the palace is one of the most prominent tourist destinations. The grounds are full of temples, ornate buildings, spires and perfectly manicured gardens.

To me though, the real treasure is the roughly two kilometers of murals lining the walls around the palace.

My first hotel was The StandardX. This was my first StandardX and I think it is the perfect hotel for anyone visiting Bangkok for the first time, especially if you are a Hyatt loyalist. It is category two so you can get it cheaply on points, but it also often has reasonable cash rates, so much so that the points rate can be a bad deal.

I actually booked three nights on points, and then had another three nights booked at The Standard in the city center. However, afterwards, I liked it so much I extended my stay with another four nights on cash.

It has a very quirky identity and the place is full of fun and odd art.

It wasn't the best Globalist breakfast I've ever had, but still better than the average in the US. Good fruit selection, they covered a lot of different cuisine but minimally. So for example, they had dim sum, but usually just one type, usually har gow or shu mai, there were a couple cheeses, one type of olives, but nothing like the spreads in Istanbul. I think there was also a small menu which I never felt the need to order from. The ambiance was great though as the restaurant is on the banks of the river.

Even though this was a free Globalist breakfast, Hyatt was actually running a promo across most of Asia where they had steeply discounted cash rates that included breakfast. It was literally cheaper than the standard member rate.

The best part about the StandardX has to be the location. I had rooms on the third or fourth floor overlooking the river. The first night, there was live music and I could sit outside on my balcony watching the show. 

In addition, the hotel is literally attached to one of the piers for the hop on hop off tourist boats. This makes it a perfect place to stay when seeing everything on the river. 

The StandardX is on the river, but if you head a few blocks east of there you will find Khao San Road. This is a famous, some might say infamous, backpacker/tourist destination. It has a feel similar to a sketchier Thai version of the French Quarter, the kind of neighborhood where you can find fried scorpions, go-go dancers and McDonalds all in the same few blocks.

I bought a fried scorpion. I think the lady selling them really enjoyed watching tourists eat them. They fry them up right in front of you and this neutralizes the venom in the tail. I remember being a little surprised by the price so I think there is a substantial tourist markup, but it's still reasonable.

A single scorpion isn't very filling, so I found one of the quieter, nicer looking places with live music. The food and drinks really weren't very good. I got the feeling that this area was  a place for tourists, fun to experience, but maybe not where you really want to go for dinner.

Botanic Backyard is about a block and a half south east of The StandardX, and this neighborhood is where you want to go instead of Khao San Road. Lots of good restaurants, hotels and hostels, places for laundry, live music, but without the chaos in Khao San Road.

It's not cheap by Thai standards, but the food and drinks here are fantastic. The crispy pork belly was the most delicious thing I had on the trip and I ended up coming back and ordering it a few times. I think it was only about 250 BAHT which was less than most of their fancy cocktails.

The StandardX is right at N13 on the north end of the Hop On / Hop Off tourist line. They sell day passes at the pier, which are probably more than you will need, but they're so cheap the convenience is worth it.

Icon Siam is basically a giant mall, but the cool kind. Malls are very different in Southeast Asia. Like malls here, they have lots of shopping, but they also tend to have a lot more spectacle and originality. They are places people walk to, and they have AC, which makes them havens in a tropical climate.

The Alangkarn Waterfall shown below was built in 2018, the year before the Rain Vortex in Singapore was completed.

The lower floor of Icon Siam is very much like an open market, about half full of little food stalls. I got some dumplings and ate them outside along the river.

Unquestionably, the coolest animatronic things I've ever seen is Sunshine, the giant sleeping dachshund in chain mail found in the Tamburins store. You can see him breathing and his little ears twitching while he sleeps. The advertising campaign is also very cool.

The animatronic dinosaurs at Jurassic World were almost as cool as Sunshine, the sleeping dachshund. In all seriousness, this is very cool and very expensive. 

You enter in timed groups and they lead you on a room by room experience. The group gathers in a waiting area where Mr DNA tells the story of harvesting dinosaur DNA from mosquitos. Once everyone is there, you head into the first room and take seats in a virtual boat for a 5 minute presentation on your way to the island. All the windows are LCD screens and you can see whales and dinosaurs in the waters around you.

From there you enter a room with Ankylosaurus (the best dinosaur), then a room with raptors where you can have your picture taken with "Blue". 

This is followed by an observatory for Indominus Rex. That's when things start going wrong when the animals break containment. The the group is running through a series of encounters with pterodactyls, dilophosaurus and a T-Rex. Ultimately, the whole group escapes to the most dangerous room of all, the gift shop.

Asiatique is a little park and set of warehouses with shops and dining along the river. It has a few rides and Jurassic World is one of its anchors. 

Tha Maharaj is a small, local mall a few blocks away from the Amulet Market where locals go to buy amulets of all kinds. Some are cheap souvenirs for tourists and some are genuine. I arrived either too late or too early, and most of the local vendors had closed up, but I was able to buy a few talismans, one of which provides good luck for travelers.

Wat Arun, also known as the Dawn Temple, is a famous temple on the banks of the river. It actually appears on the 10 Baht coin and is Instagrammer central.

Lots of women (and some men) would rent Thai costumes from one of several shops around the temple. The temple then licenses professional photographers to work on the temple grounds and you can book one of them. The official ones all have numbers on their vests.

In between my stays at The StandardX, I stayed three nights at The Standard in the city center. This was my first stay at the brand. I think I preferred the StandardX but The Standard was really spectacular.

Between it being an FHR and Globalist stay, they gave me a fairly nice room. It wasn't technically a suite, but it was nicer than many suites I've been given. It had an amazing view, even from the bathtub. They also had a nice fancy Toto toilet with a fully featured bidet and a self opening and closing lid.

The hotel is inside the (King Power) Mahanakhon skyscraper. At the top of the skyscraper, there is a rooftop bar/club called Sky Beach. This is the tallest rooftop bar in Bangkok and probably one of the best in the world. The view from up there gives major Blade Runner vibes.

The hotel gives all guests daily passes to Sky Beach as well as a buy one get one on drinks. If you are there on an Amex FHR stay like I was, the $100 credit works at Sky Beach and the food there is actually quite affordable. You could easily feed a whole family.

I'd been to Lumphini Park a few years ago, during the afternoon. This time, I came back at night and it was a very different feel. It was much cooler at night and there were far fewer water monitor lizards and far more people out exercising.

The city center doesn't have a lot of great places to go running. So in the evening, hoards of jogger seemed to be taking over Lumphini. There was also a very large group aerobics / dance off at one end of the park with a couple hundred people.

I had extended my stay in Bangkok both because I enjoyed it so much, but also because I needed to catch a very particular flight to Kuala Lumpur and on to Kuantan Malaysia. Unfortunately, that flight left around 7am, and that meant I really needed to stay close to the airport my final night.

The airport regency is kind of amazing. It's connected to the airport by a short walkway, right past the train station. They have a full lounge, high touch service, and gave me a great suite. The welcome amenity was a literal tower of treats.

It's a long commute from the airport to most hotels in town and I often arrive tired or need to leave early. This hotel is perfect for an arrival or departure night.

Overall, I really enjoyed my stay in Bangkok, far more than my first trip there a few years earlier when I stayed at the Grand Hyatt. The Grand Hyatt Bangkok had the best service of any hotel I have ever stayed in (it was magical), but the location is firmly in the city and it felt relatively far from many of the sites I wanted to see. I felt like I was always navigating hot smoggy urban streets.

In contrast, the StandardX  had the perfect location where I could enjoy a breezy cruise on the river and The Standard had a really nice hard product plus the advantage of Sky Beach. Either way, I think Bangkok is a city you can visit again and again and see all new things every time.

This has been part three of a five part round the world trip.

• Cruising to the Old World
• Istanbul not Constantinople
• Better in Bangkok
• Killing Time in Kuantan
• Sunny in Sydney

Continue on to see the journey to Kuantan.