River Market & Train Market

We got an early start at 6:30 a.m. to head an hour and half drive to visit the salt farms and hop on a train to Amphoe Mueang Samut Sonkhram – Mae Klong train station.

Our guide, “Poppy” below and us on the train to Mae Klong.

The market at Mae Klong is famous for being situated inches from the train track so when the train comes, the vendors have to pull their umbrellas and other stuff off the tracks. You can read about it here.

The train ride itself, is fairly comfortable although there is no air conditioning.

After the train and market visit, we headed to a coconut sugar farm. I cook my own bread at home and I often bake with coconut sugar instead of refined sugar. I always wondered how it was made and now I know! We bought some to take back home too. In addition to coconut sugar they also make coconut syrup, oils, creams and gels that have many different uses.

The coconut “cooking” process to extract sugar.

After the coconut farm we headed to the River Market in Damnoen Saduak. I had no idea these river markets were as large as they were. I imagined a single line river stream with various “shops” anchored on the shore but there were many different river streams and shops were anchored or floating with various places to land and experience larger shops. There is one shop in particular that has secret passageways which I can’t get into here but you can always ask if you see us in person 😉

We ended the day with lunch at a nearby restaurant and ordered the grilled seafood pineapple. It was delicious.

It was a long exhausting day but nice to take a break from all the medical visits! We finished the day with another massage. The 1 hour body massage was 600 baht ($17.51).

Tomorrow we move to a different hotel so I’ll be writing our review of our current hotel.