Snapshots of Bangkok: A Guide to its Most Picturesque Sights

Bang Rak is one of the most vibrant of Bangkok’s fifty districts, where lavish hotels, glitzy rooftop bars, and a funky art scene meet royal temples and some of the city’s oldest mosques. On this walking tour, you’ll explore the popular district to seek out these temples and mosques, along with plenty of quirky shophouse cafes that have been watching the world go by for hundreds of years.

This tour takes you from the Saphan Taksin BTS station on a 4km stroll through some of the city’s most historical and colorful areas. You’ll pass the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok, the city’s oldest luxury hotel, and find out about its famous guests. You’ll see Bangkok’s chandelier-clad General Post Office, possibly the grandest of its kind. In the creative district, you’ll wander through Warehouse 30, a community art space lined with trendy stores and artisanal coffee shops. The tour ends at Wat Traimit, the Temple of the Golden Buddha, where you can gaze upon its beautiful solid gold Buddha statue which weighs 5.5 tons, and hear how its stayed hidden in plain sight for 500 years.

Along the way, you’ll have a chance to:

• Take plenty of amazing photos of Siamese architecture, religious relics, the mighty Chao Phraya River, and historic shophouses
• Discover the history behind the fascinating buildings that house the French and Portuguese embassies
• Enjoy a round of retail therapy at some of Bangkok’s hippest boutiques or drain your savings account in a dusty antique store (no refunds on haunted treasure maps!)
• Gain insights into how Thailand went from a sleepy fishing village into a Southeast Asian megacity
• See the Holy Rosary Church, established purely out of spite when Portuguese churchgoers left their congregation because it’d become too heavily influenced by its French members
• Brave a pungent shot of Bolivian arabica at an ultra-hipster cafe that you might mistake for a junk shop
• Enjoy tales of Bangkok’s early history, filled with whining diplomats, political intrigue, and religious infighting
• Learn what an executed royal, an exiled Vietnamese emperor, and Tom Cruise have in common (hint – they all made the authorities angry, some way more than others)

By the end of this tour, you’ll have walked through one of Bangkok’s most interesting neighborhoods and will (hopefully) have a ton of great photos to keep your socials lit up for months.