10 Off the Beaten Track Bangkok Experiences

If you’re blooming mad about flowers, don’t miss Pak Khlong Talad. The city’s biggest flower market offers an exotic sensory treat, especially between 2am and sunrise, when lorries brimming with freshly cut flora, fruit and vegetables rattle in from neighbouring provinces and this unassuming roadside bursts into a symphony of fragrant smells and vibrant colours. Roses, daisies, chrysanthemums, indigenous orchids – they’re all here in droves, and at minuscule prices.

Rod Fai Market is an open-air bazaar just behind Seacon Square Shopping Mall on Srinakarin Road Soi 51. The vintage look never goes out of style here. Spread on the ground is all kinds of collectables and memorabilia from yesteryear, from antique furniture to hippy fashion to Mao kitsch. The overall feel is down-to-earth cool.

A huge, 3-headed elephant statue standing upon an equally gargantuan pedestal is the first thing you see when visiting Samut Prakan's Erawan Museum. It's a splendid, towering beast: 250 tons in weight, 29 metres high, 39 metres long, and cast in a pure green-hued copper. The sculpture is the museum itself, which houses a wide range of artefacts in a psychedelic setting.

Bangkok Forensic Museum, located inside the Siriraj Hospital, offers a sinister exhibition for the morbid or for travellers searching for something extremely unusual. Expect deformed babies and mutated organs preserved in jars, as well as the mummified remains of Bangkok's most prolific cannibal. 

Papaya Studio Bangkok is like no other shop you have even seen before. Many have heard of it, but few have actually stepped inside it. Trying to list the amazing objects, items, figures, toys, household objects and furniture tightly packed next to each other would be impossible, but you can’t help but notice the pinball machines, Vespas, and full-size comic characters like Flash, Wolverine, Green Lantern and Batman, all proudly standing next to... a pair of giant rabbits.

Also known as the Bangkok Phallic Shrine, this unique place of worship honours a female fertility spirit called Chao Mae Tubtim. Hundreds of penises, from small wooden carvings to big stone sculptures that stand over 2 metres tall and decorated with ribbons, make this Bangkok shrine quite unique. Women visit this shrine when they are trying to conceive, leaving offerings of lotus and jasmine. 

The Royal Thai Air Force Museum has a small but surprisingly interesting plane collection hidden away near Don Mueang International Airport. Covering the entire history of Thai Aviation since the very first biplanes, about 30 aircraft are displayed partly outdoor, partly indoor inside a couple of large hangars. 

For a real sense of how locals used to live (and how some still do) – in stilted shacks, old wooden townhouses and dilapidated lean-tos – join a tour of Bangkok's Thonburi khlongs (canals). A boat ride along the canals usually begins on the Chao Phraya, the main river that bisects Bangkok in a wide arc. From there, the narrow waterways spread into the city on either bank.