Bangkok Overview Travel Guide

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Visiting Bangkok is for the first time is a sensory overload of massive proportions. The whole city seems to try to grab your attention at every available moment, from the street hawkers to the eye-catching temples, the modern skyscrapers to the painted longtail boats zipping up and down the river. [more]

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Experience Bangkok's favorite sights as others see them. Let our visual picture tour of Bangkok help you choose the best places to visit in Bangkok:

To venture from your hotel in Bangkok is to step into a world of amazing sights, inviting smells and horrendous traffic problems. The secret to surviving Bangkok is therefore to find you own way of coping with this car-induced horror, from rising above it all in the Skytrain, bypassing it on an Express river boat, or risking it all in a tuk-tuk.

All three ways will show you a different Bangkok. The Skytrain glides effortlessly in air-conditioned exclusion past gleaming shopping malls to the busy international business districts, fast and efficient. This is the face of fashionable, aspiring Bangkok, with its high-rise bars and exclusive lounges, gourmet restaurants and (genuine) designer outfits. It's sleek, modern and energetic, yet existing in a culture of strict social conventions and royal loyalty.

Riverboats take you along the cooling main artery of the city, past gleaming temples and historic sights just waiting to be explored. This is the way to travel to ancient Bangkok, golden, gilded and extravagant, but also devout, everyday and thriving. Temples are filled with worshippers and tourists alike, religious festivals pack the streets with noise, spectacle and devotion, all happening under the benign smile of thousands of Buddha images, large and small. The river too, permeates the streets through the network of klongs, or canals, where stilted houses and grand villas alike jostle for prime position at the water's edge.

From the river, at some point, you'll disembark at a pier and join the crowds again. Here, the world always seems to want to sell you something, from tempting snacks from hawkers carts to clothing, jewellery and fake watches. It's all done with a smile and an overt friendliness that belies a darker undercurrent. Bangkok's scams, touts and tourist traps are legendary, but as a savvy tourist, armed with a firm "No thank you", you can love Bangkok at street level from the moment you set foot there.

A tuk-tuk ride is an iconic journey through the gridlocked streets, and often a journey of adventure as you are never 100% sure of where you will end up, but isn't that half the fun? Fun too, if taken with the right attitude, is the naughty side to Bangkok, the counterfeit salesmen and girlie bars of Patpong, the ladyboy cabarets and the 'shows' that are not for the faint-hearted or easily shocked. Just like similar districts around the world, this less desirable face of Bangkok is being stamped on by the city authorities, and may one day disappear for ever.

In the meantime, the unique mix of the devout and the deviant life side by side in the ultimate melting pot of tastes, tolerance and trade, Bangkok.