Bangkok, Thailand. July 2023.
We soaked into Bangkok’s “happy and healthy” lifestyle by running in a jogging track next to a bike lap which literally goes around the airport, a good option for stop-overs and lengthy stays alike.
TLDR; “too long, didn’t read”
- I just want to run! Take me to RUN.
- I have 1 minute. Take me to USEFUL INFORMATION.
- Running is my excuse for travelling. Take me to TRIP.
- Running is my excuse for eating. Take me to CARBOLOADING.
- I want to know what to read in the plane. Take me to ONE BOOK.
🌍 The trip 📷: What to see in Bangkok in a couple of days
On our last trip to Thailand, we stopped in Bangkok for a day on our way home.
We didn’t have much time. But luckily we had visited the city a couple of times before. Also I was familiar with its business scene, since a company I worked for in the past had its Asian headquarters here.
Out of déformation professionelle, I also knew that Bangkok is a hub for software companies. It offers fierce competency to Europeans and Americans. But this time I could check in person how digitalisation is embroidered in its daily life. And I also saw the curious fondness some people have here for teddies: some of my former Thai colleagues used to come to the office with them, and in our hotel room we found a pink bunny!
Love Bangkok
Bangkok is an amazing city, vibrant and full of contrasts. Just after landing we could already witness how modernity and tradition mix.
Bangkok is full of urban elevated highways, but with golden statues as decorations. And, like in the rest of Thailand, there were traditional street stalls serving spicy tasty food, chaotic traffic and dense cobwebs of cables dangling from every electricity pole!
Bangkok is vast and widespread, with many ways of transportation. It is known for its tuk tuks, a motorized open-air rickshaw with three wheels, normally with a cloth to protect passengers from the scorching sun. It is rumored that they took this name from the noisy engines of early models. Nowadays there is even an on-demand hop on and hop off tuk tuk service that functions around Bangkok Old Town major attractions!
If you want to experience Bangkok’s penchant for modernity articulated through elevated “whatever”, try the BTS Skytrain: an elevated rapid transit system.
In fact, there are even some elevated running tracks, like the one at theTrue Digital Park. We noted it down for next time 🏃♀️🏃♀️🏃♀️
Once in Bangkok, you cannot miss the Grand Palace. It’s the official residence of Thai monarchs from the 18th to mid-20th century. An architectural beauty in which the Wat Phra Kaew, the temple of the Emerald Buddha, stands out.
Three temple landmarks of Bangkok are also world-renowned.
The Wat Pho, the temple of the Reclining Buddha (which is massive: 46 meter long)
The Wat Arun, the temple of Dawn, with a beatiful tower next to the river Chao Phraya
And the Wat Traimit, the temple of the Golden Buddha, which holds the world’s largest solid Buddha statue (5.5 tons).
🏃♀️ The run
When looking for places to run, during the transfer from the airport to our hotel, we were recommended the amazing Happy and Healthy bike lap. Almost by chance: when the owner of the hotel overheard our conversation about Lumphini Park.
“Oh, but there is a place to cycle and run very close nearby”, she signaled to us vehemently.
“A Bike lap? What’s that?”, we asked ourselves, and later we looked it up on the internet. It is announced on the website as “More than a bike lap”, and it really is.
The jogging track
Located around the airport, it is a 23k long lap for cyclists, but it has many other facilities, including the one that we were interested in: a running track! Announced as a “jogging” track, it is a 1.4k long lap that we enjoyed thoroughly. What a pleasant surprise!
But it was also terribly hot. Even at that time in the evening. We arrived at the jogging track and realized it was prepared for the hot climate. There was a station where people left their drinks at the beginning of the lap. Everything was perfectly organized. So we left our bottle of water, and set off.
We reached the HHBL facilities at 7pm, a perfect timing as it wasn’t dark yet, but the sun was not going to make the workout unbearable. We saw an immense car park and many people with bicycles. A couple of areas were set up for kids, a kids bike park, and a “balance car park”, where small children were riding very small bicycles. Ït was all terribly cute.
The track is 5 meters long and very flat. It features a ‘soft-impact’ EDPM rubber, which you can really feel in your knees. It does feel like you are flying 🥰
At dark
The whole track is also lit up when the sun sets, which does help. And next to it there is vegetation and lakes, so the atmosphere is that of a park, not of the usual somber surroundings of busy airports. But you still get to see the planes landing very close: flight-radar comes in handy! We even saw a massive Airbus 380 coming from Dubai.
In the track, people run anti-clock wise, and the atmosphere is very amiable. Not too many competitive runners; instead, everybody is jogging at their own pace and it does not get crowded.
And, incredibly, the jogging track is free!
For next time, we will still try running in Lumphini Park, the first public Park in Bangkok, which features a 2.5k running track, but we really enjoyed this run: we did 4 laps to complete 6k, and finished off with a sense of accomplishment and a lot of admiration for Bangkok’s healthy lifestyle.
🍜 Carboloading 🍝: What to eat in Bangkok if you are a runner
HHBL offers many options for eating. Together with a KFC and other food offerings, our beloved cafe in South East Asia, “Cafe Amazon”, is also there. My own recommendation 👩🦰 from Cafe Amazon is “Ice Chocolate” with 50% sugar.
We opted to go to the food booths, since they were from local vendors and apparently very popular with the local cyclists. There were 10 food booths: some served delicious Thai food that you can eat at one of the many tables located in front of the stalls. But the ones that caught our attention the most were the ones serving drinks: shakes, juices and all kinds of smoothies.
We walked around, unable to decide due to the large food offering, while many cyclists looking tired queued, or were served drinks as colorful as the images in the menus. We were spoiled for choice: there were watermelon, passion fruit, avocado with cocoa or mango smoothies, anti aging or energy booster fruit juices, or strawberry and banana shakes. They even served protein shakes!
But, alas! We painfully learnt that it was only possible to pay with a local app that we could not download 😢…
So, we later decided to use Grab, the app that we did have in our cell phone, to order a fruit smoothie and drink it in our hotel!
📝 Tip: we used Grab extensively in SouthEast asia, to order food but mainly to order car rides. It is extremely convenient.
Other very good options!
If we had had more time, we would have visited the famous Chatuchak Weekend Market, which has more than 8,000 stalls: one of the largest markets in the world. We would have enjoyed some of our favorite dishes: Pad Thai 🍜 and Papaya Salad, about which I have written extensively in my Koh Samui’s post, here.
Pad Thai, probably the most famous Thai dish, which is made with rice noodles, eggs, bean sprouts, peanuts and lime and Papaya Salad which is super healthy, made with shredded green papaya. Other options are the soup Tom Yum or a Green Curry 🍛. And you can finish off with a good dessert: Mango sticky rice!
Useful information
🏃♀️ 1.4k lap course next to Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok, Thailand.
🕝 Open 6AM to 9PM every day.
⛰️ Difficulty: Easy. Super nice track with very soft rubber.
👟 Regular city shoes. Do not overdo it: no need for professional spikes which are used in track for competition!
✅ Its soft and wide surface and the facilities.
✅ The friendly and healthy atmosphere, with planes taking off and landing as an ‘exotic’ distraction.
❌ The course is only 1.4k long, so not suitable if you want to train long distances.
One book
| 📖 “The Bangkok series”, by John Burdett: “Bangkok 8: A novel”, “Bangkok Tattoo”, “Bangkok Haunts”, “The Godfather of Kathmandu”, “Vulture Peak” and “The Bangkok Asset” 📖 “Lord Jim”, by Joseph Condrad 📖 “The windup girl”, by Paolo Bacigalupi |
The Bangkok series by John Burdett:
“Bangkok 8: A novel”, “Bangkok Tattoo”, “Bangkok Haunts”, “The Godfather of Kathmandu”, “Vulture Peak” and “The Bangkok Asset”
Written by John Burdett, the son of a policeman and a lawyer who practiced in Hong Kong, the first book, “Bangkok 8”, was very successful and expanded into a series.
It was a nice surprise to discover this series, especially as I do like detective novels with larger-than-life characters.
The first one, “Bangkok 8”, is a typical crime thriller in which nothing is typical. Set in Bangkok, follows the investigation of a murder of a US marine… by a swarm of cobras inside a Mercedes-Benz! Bizarre murders are a constant in the series, starring Buddhist detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, former monk, a half caste, very familiar with Western culture because of a US father he never knew, and who has a very distinctive way of solving murders.
The novels are well documented, rich and atmospheric, and you get transported to the dark underground scene of Bangkok. It is a sort of “Bangkok noir” with Buddhist meditations 🙂
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“Lord Jim”, by Joseph Conrad
I included “Lord Jim” in my post about Koh Samui, but there is a significant episode of the book that takes place in Bangkok: when Jim, a disgraced sailor looking for redemption all across Asia, gets into a fistfight.
The book is interesting because it describes very different times in Thailand and in all South East Asia: times now overshadowed by the changes during the XX and early XXI centuries.
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“The Windup girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi
And this novel is the opposite to “Lord Jim” in the sense that it focuses on the future. A dystopian and dark future, that contrasts vividly with the “happy and healthy” atmosphere we lived in on the jogging track. Although there is something in the way Thailand is changing, I could very easily imagine the city evolving into something almost unrecognizable in the future.
The author, American, graduated in Asian studies and has won many prizes, including the Nebula one.
The book is dark, almost depressing in its view, but creative, complex and well engineer: like the bioengineering that articulates the plot. It is set in a future where climate change has changed the face of Earth and only Thailand is an exception, having its own seeds when the rest of the world is using “genehacked” seeds and bioterrorism. The title refers to a genetically modified woman that is used as a servant, almost a slave…
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