Nara Everyone tells you to take the train in Bangkok. It's fast, it's cold, it's clean. I take the river when I'm not in a hurry, which is more often than my clients would like.
The ferry is where the city talks. The ticket collector moves along the deck shaking a long metal tube full of tickets and coins, chk-chk, chk-chk, and you hear her before you see her. You say where you're going. She tears a little pink slip off the roll without looking, folds the change into your palm, and is gone before you've said thank you. ขอบคุณค่ะ, to her back.
I stood at the back with my camera, where the spray reaches you. The river was brown and busy: long-tail boats cutting across, a temple roof catching the last of the light, someone's laundry drying on a balcony right over the water. Every pier smelled different. Jasmine. Diesel. Pork grilling over charcoal somewhere I couldn't see.
I shot half a roll on that ride. Most of it is blurry. I like the blurry ones best. They look the way the boat feels.
from the same roll
I got off near the old riverside streets and followed my nose to a night market setting up under strings of bulbs. An auntie was selling mango sticky rice from a cart: mango cut in long neat slices, coconut cream poured from a little steel cup. I ate at a folding table while she wrote my receipt by hand, then stamped it PAID in red, hard enough to rattle the table. ชำระแล้ว.
That's the thing about home. You stop seeing it. You need a slow boat and a plastic table to remember that it's a very strange, very beautiful place.
the souvenir · kept
A night-market receipt, ferry ticket stapled on
On the walk home I found the ferry ticket in my pocket and stapled it to the receipt so they'd stay together. Pink slip, white receipt, one red stamp. It went into my notebook that night and became page one.
Every trip since has had to earn a page after that one.
กรุงเทพฯ ร้อนมาก แต่ก็บ้านเรา
— nara