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.