Bangkok is a massive city full of attractions and sights to see – and getting around is definitely not straightforward. The public transport is difficult to navigate, the traffic is horrendous – and it’s boiling hot, hectic and generally a difficult place to find your way around if you’re not familiar with the city.
We only had limited time in Bangkok and were conscious of not wanting to waste precious time figuring out how to get around, what to see and what order to see it all in.
Having spent ages scouring Tripadvisor for excursions that might enable us to see the main sights more easily, we found a company called Your Thai Guide, which appeared to be very highly rated.
Many of the other tour providers in Bangkok provide fixed itineraries, taking you to specified sights on a set schedule – some in groups with other tourists, others private just to your own group.
Your Thai Guide is different in that they simply provide you with a private tour guide who will come and meet you at your hotel – and will spend the whole day taking you around the city independently, helping you navigate to wherever you want to go and making sure you see everything you want to see in the best possible order.
You get to choose whatever time you want to start / finish and get a local person, who knows the city, its attractions and its people, like the back of their hand, who will accompany you everywhere for the whole day, sorting out your travel / attraction tickets, making sure you’re seeing everything in the most efficient order at the best times – and telling you the stories and history of all the sights as well.
The tour guide we were assigned was named Sunny. We were given her direct WhatsApp number so we could arrange exactly when we wanted to meet – and she arrived at our hotel lobby area ready to hear about what we wanted to do – and to make her own recommendations to us as to what she thought was worth seeing based on our interests.
She spoke great English and was friendly and clearly very keen to make sure we’d have the best day possible.
Having someone on your side in Bangkok who speaks the language and knows the city is extremely valuable, especially given the confusing nature of the transport system and the number of people who are out to scam tourists who look as if they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing.
With Your Thai Guide, you pay for your own transport costs / tickets yourself – and you have to cover the cost of the guide’s tickets too.
You also pay for their food if you stop for a meal – which is no problem given the low cost of eating out in Bangkok and it’s also very beneficial to have a local who can recommend the best places to eat too.
Sunny helped us get set up on the Asian taxi app ‘Grab’ (there’s no Uber in Thailand, but Grab is basically identical) and we quickly got a cab from our hotel to our first destination – the Grand Palace.
The Grand Palace is probably the main ‘must-see’ attraction of Bangkok – an enormous, extravagant palace and temple which has to be seen to be believed.
Sunny helped us avoid the longest queues, quickly took us to a nearby shop selling scarves / trousers for just a couple of £pounds (you can’t enter the Grand Palace, or many of Bangkok’s other temples wearing shorts or with shoulders exposed) and took us straight to the best viewpoints around the palace.
She knew exactly what the best photo spots were – and constantly helped us take photos together.
Instead of wandering aimlessly around the huge palace, trying to figure it out ourselves, we had Sunny taking us directly to everything we needed to see, saving us time and making the experience far more efficient and worthwhile.
There were a couple of other temples we wanted to see, which Bangkok is famous for – but how would we find our way from the Grand Palace to those others – like the Temple of the Dawn, or the famous Reclining Buddha?
Left to our own devices, we’d have had to try navigating by Google Maps in the boiling heat, figuring out the train system, maybe being scammed by rogue tuk-tuk drivers, sitting in endless traffic jams….
But not with Sunny as our guide – she was able to call up a contact she knew with a long-tail boat who would come and meet us at a pier right near the Grand Palace and who’d take us on an interesting and enjoyable river ride through Bangkok to our next destination.
It’s worth spending some time on the river in Bangkok – partly because it’s a much less stressful mode of transport, but also because you get to see a different side of the city from the river.
It’s not all good – we wound our way past some of the most horrendous looking housing we’ve ever seen, built directly over the river on stilts, many of the properties literally crumbling into the river, the locals living in what appear to be slum conditions – often built directly alongside gigantic, ornate golden temples.
One impressive sight is the huge Buddha statue that looks over the river, though it’s jarring to see such an elaborate construction literally looking down over these terrible shanty-town style buildings that line the river-front.
Another big surprise to us on the river was the huge lizards crawling out of the water and laying along the river bank.
Massive ‘Water Monitor Llizards’ which to a first-time visitor to Thailand like us came as a real surprise to see so up close (though we’d soon get used to seeing lots more of them around the country).
The Temple of the Dawn is a prominent pyramid-shaped river-side temple which looks superb as the sun sets behind it – and Sunny took us to a couple of viewpoints where we could get the best sight of the setting sun behind the temple, before heading to another of Bangkok’s most-famous attractions – the great ‘Temple of the Reclining Buddha’.
Bangkok is so hectic and so intensely hot and humid, I was just imagining how stressed we’d have got trying to find our own way around to these places, dragging two teenage children behind us – I had a strong feeling that there would’ve been a very high chance the day might’ve descended into stress, arguments and lots of missed sights and opportunities if we were trying to find our way to these places ourselves.
Having a personal tour guide with us really came into its own on the next part of the day, as Sunny found a couple of tuk-tuk drivers that she knew and trusted personally, who would take us around town to several other places in quick-succession.
Tuk-tuks are a popular tourist attraction and an iconic sight on Bangkok’s streets that every visitor loves to have their photo taken in.
But we heard many stories that you don’t always get what you expect with them – and it’s common that, rather than take you to your requested destination – they’ll take you to a shop that pays them a commission for each visitor they bring in.
Or that the price you agreed to pay at the start of the ride isn’t what they end up charging you at the end.
No such problems with the Thai Guide though, as Sunny’s trusted tuk-tuk drivers took us around the city from one stop to the next, waiting outside for us as we visited more temples – and sometimes dropping us at one end of a road, allowing us to walk along it and coming round to meet us at the other end.
We saw the Wat Prayurawongsawat Worawihan temple this way, then the Bangkok flower market, the Khao San Road and then China Town.
Khao San Road is a lively market street packed full with travellers from all over the world visiting bars, clubs and restaurants, especially at night, which is when we visited.
China Town was probably the busiest area – packed full of restaurants and absolutely rammed with tourists.
Sunny was able to take us to a restaurant she knew and recommended, which was extremely useful as we’d have no way of picking a good one ourselves given the huge choice and the overwhelming amount of people crowding into them.
She also took us round street food stalls and shops selling traditional Thai foods and fruit, before eventually our time with her neared the end.
We needed to head back to our hotel, which was about 45-minutes outside the centre of Bangkok – and Sunny took us to the Metro (underground train) station and showed us how to navigate it and buy tickets so that we’d know what we were doing when we were left to our own devices the next day.
Waiting until we were safely in a taxi back to the hotel, she then headed off home.
We were exhausted from a long day, miles of walking in extremely hot weather and overwhelmed by the insane sights and experiences of the crazy city of Bangkok.
But we’d seen everything we wanted to see in the most efficient way possible, which we could never have done without the private tour guide provided by Your Thai Guide.
Bangkok is a pretty mad place. The heat and humidity means you’re constantly sweating all day and night.
The roads seem lawless with dense traffic jams everywhere – families of four with babies balanced precariously on the handlebars of mopeds weave their way through the traffic and it seems the rules of things like roundabouts and pedestrian crossings are completely ignored as cars, mopeds and tuk-tuks fight each other for every available space on the road.
On the one hand you have sacred temples, quiet and peaceful where women aren’t allowed to expose their shoulders or legs and buddhists pray and meditate.
Then virtually next door, streets lined with lady-boy sex shows and prostitutes, loud pumping music, cannabis shops and hordes of tourists partying and generally having a good time.
Someone completely new to the place, with limited time to explore, would have little chance of finding their way around successfully and safely.
The excursions sold by tour operators that run to a rigid fixed schedule are one way of seeing the sights – and we nearly booked a couple of those before finding the Your Thai Guide company.
But those tours are inflexible – taking you to set places where you get a specified time at each, with no option to deviate from the route if you want to spend longer somewhere, get bored with somewhere else and want to move on – or have interests that are different from those that the tour operator are catering to.
That’s why Your Thai Guide was so good – the complete flexibility, the totally custom nature of the day and the superb inside knowledge of someone who knows the city better than anyone.
It’s a very good way of seeing Bangkok as fully and efficiently as possible in a short space of time and we definitely highly recommend booking with them.