Some pictures from this weekend's walk

Although this large canal isn't as interesting as some of the smaller ones I've walked here are few bits that caught my eye. Click on any the pictures for a larger view.

About half-way along I found the biggest and most professional fish raising pens. They were made of lots of small pens tied together. Later when I walked back down KingKaow Road I saw pickups waiting for fish from these pens. It looked like they were breeding small fish for sale to the fish farms so the water must be good here.

Because this area off Kingkaow Road is industrial there are many apartment buildings for the workers, mainly young people from out of town, to rent. Some were painted in pleasant pastel colours and I suspect most people would prefer this than the plain cement buildings. I think some of the London suburbs could be improved by copying these colours.

At the Bangna-Trat Highway end of the canal is a large Chinese temple-like building. Below you can see the canal side of it with the fine ceramic detail on the roof and the view of the front from the road.

The New Bangkok Airport Klongs

Yesterday and today I have been walking the rest of the klong that runs north-south on the western edge of the new Bangkok airport, Suvarnabhumi. (No, I'm not going to say how it's pronounced.) This is a wide canal and once past the southern edge of the airport there are footpaths on both sides most of the way to the Bangna-Trat Highway. On the other side of this road there are no footpaths in sight. I might have to try further south sometime.

This canal isn't very interesting but it did give me a chance to get in some decent exercise. All up over three days walking, always returning to the car, I did about 26 kilometres with the longest day being 12 kilometres. At first I thought the canal might have been part of the airport development but it seems to be a bit older than that. The communities along the canal seem to be mainly buddhist unlike the canals a few kilometres to the north which have a large Moslem population.

Below is a picture from Google Earth which shows the paths with yellow dots. I'm not sure why Google has such a poor resolution view of the airport. Maybe it's a security problem.

An evening walk by Suvarnabhumi Airport

I did two trips to the Suvarnabhumi Airport yesterday and on the first spied a long pathway on a wide canal that skirts the western edge of the airport. I decided that after the second trip I would walk a part of it. The problem was I didn't have a chance to do it until 5:45 PM. If you have never lived in the tropics then you wouldn't realize that dusk and dawn are relatively short periods here. One minute it's light and the next it's dark, and vice-versa.

Looking south along the canal and getting dark

I'm not sure whether this is a canal dug to drain the airport area before its construction or one of the much older canals draining the eastern suburbs into the Samut Prakan Chao Prya River estuary. I could only walk about 20 minutes in daylight to the south before turning back and apart from the new airport there wasn't a lot of interest. There were some boys fishing with large cast nets and I was surprised to see large frogs, about 6 inches nose to tail, being reared in net pens in the klong.

FedEx aircraft at the cargo terminal

The western side of the airport is the cargo area and one of the runways. Planes were taking off over me every few minutes so it's certainly busy. One last photo below. I'm not sure if I will do the whole walk on this canal as I think I have a few more interesting walks still to do.

Looking across to the airport