Garuda Indonesia Colours Magazine November 2016 | Page 94

92 Travel | Bangkok © Mark Eveleigh It would be easy to imagine that Mr Lek is a veteran fighter pilot. Only lightning-quick reflexes and nerves of steel can explain the way he battles his way across the bouncing waves of the swirling Chao Phraya River. He darts his longtail boat away from his mooring spot at Phra Athit pier and – with quick-fire bursts of throttle and rapid changes of direction – ducks and dives between the jostling vessels of what is surely one of the world’s busiest urban waterways. Mr Lek powers us out into the main channel of Bangkok’s great river to shoot past the bow of an old timber rice barge, bustling truculently upriver like an old lady on her way to the morning market. Two needle-shaped commuter boats, emblazoned with adverts for Tiger Balm and Kratingdaeng, fly past with their cargoes of workers, school kids and saffron-robed monks. An immense convoy of sand barges – great black hulks like trudging pack animals – looms in the middle of the river. Once it has passed, Mr Lek guns his powerful engine, and we blast across the front of a gleaming white tourist cruiser, a sleek river princess encrusted with neon-tinted gems around her jutting bow. The rearing nose of our boat peers cautiously into the narrow channel of the Khlong Mon canal, and within minutes we’re in another world. “An expanse of brown houses of bamboo, of mats, of leaves, of a vegetable-matter style of architecture, sprung out of the brown soil on the banks of the muddy river.” Joseph Conrad penned these words 130 years ago in what is now the Authors’ Lounge of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, but even today in bustling business boomtown Bangkok you don’t have to go far to find an old side of the city that can have changed little in the last century. The rua duan express boats of the Chao Phraya River are the most popular alternative to Bangkok’s infamous rush-hour traffic jams. Mr Lek is a typical rua hang yao longtail boat pilot – a swashbuckling fighter pilot of the waterways.