The Chao Praya

In addition to an ecumenical breakfast spread (donuts and dim sum, omelet station and noodle bar) and an all-you-can-drink happy two hours, our hotel provides a view over the Chao Praya River. The Chao Praya runs all the way from the far north of Thailand to the Gulf of Thailand. It does not, though, so much go through Bangkok as it snakes past the edges.
Bangkok is a very hard city to get around. So far as I can tell, there are no grand boulevards like the Champs Elysee or Avenida Atlantica or Fifth Avenue or even Main Street in Northampton. There are highways and there are traffic clogged city streets but the little pockets of shops, restaurants and street vendors are concentrated in Sois, little streets, often no more than alleyways, off the main streets. The Mandarin Oriental, the classic Bangkok grand hotel, begins less than 100 yards from the Northern end of the Shangri-la, where we are staying, but is a good fifteen minute walk because there’s no direct route. (Hey, I just report the hotel names. I do not make them up. If you’re wondering, the James Hilton novel that invented “Shangri-la,” a variant on Orientalist fantasies, the first Pocket Book and later made into the movie Lost Horizons with Bing Crosby, was first published in 1933.) The Sky Train helps, as does a single subway line, but they have about 30 stops total for a population of nearly 8 million.
Even though the river doesn’t go close to downtown or, more precisely, any one of the several areas that has a claim on being called downtown, it is by far the best way to travel from the area we’re in (Riverside) to Chinatown and the old parts of Bangkok where the old Royal Palace the most elaborate Wats are.