Bangkok, Thailand
Returning to active walks in Bangkok after having covid is not easy for me. I even do not know why. It seems that I get more tired after the illness, and there is simply less motivation - I don’t want to go anywhere, I don’t want to photograph people, and photographing nature seems pointless to me. Probably just a breakdown in spirit after the sickness.
But I try to push myself out of the room. On Tuesday, I overcame myself and decided to take my favorite bus route. #46. It starts in the city outskirts where I live, passes by the downtown with its numerous neighborhoods, high-rise buildings, and shopping malls, and ends in Chinatown. The route passes away from the main traffic jams of the city (Sukhumvit Road) so the full trip lasts no more than an hour and a half. And it costs only 10 baht (0.3$). This is my usual answer for the question "where to go today?": take a bus 46 and choose where to get off - just listen to your heart. 🙂
My initial plan was about going to Chinatown but I changed my mind when I saw Northern Sathon Road brightly lit with the low sun. It suddenly occurred to me that it was great to photograph skyscrapers and the Skytrain (BTS). I also remembered that I haven't uploaded anything to Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, Alamy, etc. for a long time. I photographed downtown Bangkok in the 2010s, and these images had some success on stock photo sites back then.
I left the bus on Rama IV Road and had a walk, one and a half kilometers in the heat and sun, but this did not bother me - it was nice to properly warm up after a week of covid and another week of post-covid.
I am not for the first time in the city and know where to go for the best views. BTS Chong Nonsi, I decided to check this corner of the downtown while I had been on the bus.
If you don't know, BTS (wiki) is a sort of metro but it operates on bridges elevated above streets.
Sometimes, station guards ask you to stop taking pictures. Each train may be the last so I felt anxious while taking the images. Fortunately, nobody disturbed me this time.
This area is called Bang Rak (wiki). It is known for its nightlife in alleys (more on that I'll tell in future posts) and skyscrapers.
One of them, King Power Mahanakhon (314 meters), number 2 in the list of the tallest buildings of Thailand. More details about the skyscraper on wiki.
The lower floors of King Power Mahanakhon.
A strange feature of this area of skyscrapers is that there are not very many people here, although it would seem that it should be the other way around. I don't know what the secret is but probably a lot of apartments and offices are bought as an investment or "just for fun" by clients from other countries. Probably a lot of rooms are just empty.
It often seems to us that where there is big money, there are big profits. But as I got older, it dawned on me that this is not the case.
A side construction of King Power Mahanakhon with bridges that connect the building to BTS Chong Nonsi.
More shots of BTS at Chong Nonsi.
Not being sure what to do further, I bought a ticket for traveling just to the next station, BTS Sala Daeng (because bus 46 has a stop near it).
No crowding in the Bangkok's subway and skytrain: people stand in line in front of the gates to train cars.
Never missing a chance to take a photo.
Sunset at BTS Sala Daeng.
Taniya Road, Little Tokyo of Bangkok in the background.
And that was the moment when I began starving. It seemed to me that it was enough to eat and rest on the stairs of some office building so that the forces returned for the second act of photographing amazing Bangkok. But this did not happen, I only ate but my strength did not increase. 😀 In the end, I got on bus 46 and headed back to the suburbs.
More Bangkok stories are ahead! Check out the previous ones on my pinmapple.com
I took these images with a Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D and Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G on a full-frame DSLR Nikon D750 on February 28, 2023, in Chinatown, Bangkok, Thailand.
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