Maeklong Railway Market is definitely one of the coolest tourist spots in the world, simply because of this:
I'll say this craziness worth the 1 to 1.5 hours drive from Bangkok (Maeklong Railway Market is about 70km away from Bangkok. We hired a driver, and I'll recommend to combine this with Damnoen Saduak Floating Market to save your money and time)
We started from Maeklong Station, which is the end of the train track. (Hence, the arriving or departing trains are slow enough for the vendors to react). From here, we slowly walked along the train track, crossing the wet market.
This wet market is not different from all the other wet markets across South East Asia. You can get almost everything here, from vegetables to seafood, from fresh produced to sun-dried material...... You can also get simple cooked meals, snacks, clothings, toys etc
We are not interested in shopping here. So we decided to have some local food to kill time. This local Kway Chap stall is just besides the rail track. I'll say the stall hygiene was average (for South East Asia wet market standard) so not too appealing for our European friends. However, I found this kway chap hearty.
After kway chap, we continued our journey to the end of the wet market. There's a nice small cafe selling good Thai coffee. We enjoyed some down time here while waiting for the train.
You can hear the train coming way before you can actually see it. Of course, you will also start to see the vendors and merchants begin to coolly move their belongings and umbrellas away from the tracks.
The vendors and merchants are so used to this, they even know what kind of things can be left by the track, or even on the tracks without being crashed by the train. See the following pictures for the 2 baskets of fruits on the track:
Bangkok itineraries:
