Today we are once again with Paul and Sheila on a tour through Pattaya and the surrounding areas. We dock in Laem Chabang, the port for Bangkok, but there isn’t enough time to go into the city and do it justice if you’ve not been before, so all of us “Bangkok” refugees have decided to tour Pattaya – which is at least an hour or so closer to the ship than Bangkok.
We all meet at the designated time, and proceed through the face to face immigration that has been sprung on the ship as a surprise today. We’ve never encountered this before – and we were in Thailand on the last leg of the cruise – so we’ve no idea why the officials decided we needed face to face today, but they have – so we all comply (after we had to arrange to get our passports early and all get off the ship at the same immigration time schedule – which the ship accommodated without hesitation). Finally through the passport process, we find our tour guide, Cha, and load onto the van to start our full day tour.
As we are leaving the port, Cha goes through our itinerary, and we have a little kerflufle. Paul had specifically customized the tour so that we wouldn’t go to the cultural show at the Nong Nooch gardens. Both Paul and Sheila are very like minded with us, actually, and they don’t necessarily want to see the cultural show, but they particularly don’t want to see any elephants in the show, which there are. We completely agree as we know the elephants are sometimes abused, and certainly not living out life in their natural state, and are far happier to see them at the refuge as we did on our last trip to Thailand. Fortunately, most of us agree, and we get the schedule fixed accordingly in a jiffy.
So, onto our first stop – the floating market. Cha buys us tickets and we proceed inside to a display of old carriages and moveable shrines.
Then we enter the market itself, which is not what most of us are expecting. We are thinking of the traditional Thai and Vietnamese floating markets, where all the vendors are literally floating in boats or houseboats, and you are in a boat shopping alongside. This is more a tourist trap of huts built on a stilt boardwalk featuring souvenirs. It’s pretty, but not necessarily authentic.
The closest we get to authenticity is this food vendor preparing meals on a small boat moored next to the boardwalk.
After meandering around for a while, and hitting the ATM, we finally leave the market and head to the Silverlake Vineyard, the first vineyard in Thailand. It’s a relatively long drive during which Cha talks non-stop – giving us history, kings, Rama I through X, elephant treatment (sorry, not buying it), etc., etc. She is vivacious, and readily admits she talks too much, but she is definitely full of information and opinions!
At the vineyard, we walk around the property, in a sort of out of body experience. I don’t know how else to explain it, all the buildings are built in the Mediterranean style – so while you know you are in SE Asia, you are seeing Italy. It’s a tad disquieting, but we all go with it, and snap some photos of the grapes still hanging on the vines and the misplaced architecture.
The wines are all pretty pricey – welcome to Thailand – so we all pass on purchasing any (especially not knowing if we’ll be able to bring them back aboard without a corkage fee or at all), and head off to the main attraction out here – the Khao Chee Chan Buddha Image.
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