The Clean & Calm Guest House was, as advertised on its card, 30m from the Chao Phraya Express pier at Wat Samphraya. This was a major selling point for me. It was so convenient. The first task for me was to get to the General Post Office. This was (and could still be) on the Charoen Krung Road quite a distance from Banglamphu but easily accessible on the Chao Phraya Express. I needed to get there because I was desperate for news from home, a letter from Liz perhaps and I think I had arranged for my Lonely Planet travel survival kit to be posted from home so I could pick it up in Bangkok rather than cart it around through Turkey and the Indian sub-continent or South Asia.
I am not sure whether the ticket along side this text is a ticket from that day but it certainly is a ticket from the Chao Phraya Express. It is difficult to explain the Chao Phraya Express but you stand on the pier which is a sort of floating platform and after a few minutes you notice a boat heading towards the pier very fast. The Chao Phraya is a big river, it seemed to me to be significantly wider than the Thames, and it has a huge amount of traffic on it. The Express comes up to the pier, its engine roaring and one of the crew signals to the pilot with a whistle so that it goes into reverse and the back end swings round to the pier and a rope is briefly thrown onto the pier to "secure" it while passengers quickly jump off and then jump on. Within seconds the whistle is blowing and the boat is roaring off. You make your way to a seat and then a conductress walks up and down with a roll of tickets and a chrome tube shaped coin holder with a hinged lid which the conductress opens and closes rhythmically to encourage new passengers to own up and pay their fares.I think I did pick up some mail and my book but the notes seem to say that Alan and Marilia had some problem or other.
The notes then say "pm to Golden Buddha + walkabout". The Golden Buddha is at Wat Traimit. It is at the junction of the Charoen Krung Road and Yaowarat Road and it makes sense that we would have visited it after the GPO on the Charoen Krung Road.
This ranks way up there in a category of things that might be called (like the BBC Radio 4 programme) "Things we forgot to remember".The account in the leaflet on the left is also summarised in the Lonely Planet Guide. It says that the original golden Buddha image may have been covered in stucco to protect it from marauding hordes either during the late Sukothai period (13th and 14th Century) or later in the Ayuthaya period (14th and 15th Century) when the city was under siege by the Burmese. The leaflet says that the temple that housed it was deserted and it was not until 1931 that the image was moved to its present site and then not until 1955 when it was discovered that it was made of pure gold. The Lonely Planet guide book says that it fell from a crane while it was being moved.
How can it be forgotten that something has an image of Buddha more than 3 meters high and made of 5,000 kg of pure gold inside it? If it can be forgotten in relation to such a large piece of gold then it must be possible that there are smaller and possibly larger pieces out there. Thailand is (as will become apparent) very densely populated with images of Buddha.
