The Green Lung of Bangkok

January 9, 2026

Dear little friends,

It’s been amazing weather in Bangkok. Unheard of for me to be walking around saying this out loud. A high of 81, low humidity, nice cool breezes from the north? And now we are in this fascinating city and I’M NOT SUFFERING. Unreal.

After our usual feast down in the beautiful breakfast room of the Krungkasem Srikrung Hotel (believe it or not that name is printed in entirety on their spotless white towels) we made our plans to conquer another transport option in Bangkok. As it turns out, this was a brilliant idea.

We wanted to go to Bang Kachao, otherwise known as Bangkok’s Green Lung, a not-quite-island in a huge bend in the Chao Phraya River that is mostly vegetation, mangroves, farm-ish things, and a lot of water. We knew we could rent bikes there and ride around on the cement walkways and that there would be few cars. And it’s right in the city! We weren’t about to ride our own bikes through the traffic to get to the pier, so I used the Google Maps ‘Public Transportation’ option to see how we could get there without using an expensive taxi.

Everyday our bikes look a little different at our hotel. Lots of other luggage comes and goes in this area.

You can see why Bang Kachao is called the Green Lung.

I was astonished to see that a few meters away from our hotel was a bus stop and if we took the #4 bus it would literally take us to within a few meters of the pier. When you take a taxi in Bangkok you’re paying a meter price, and it’s both time and distance. On the bus you’re also stuck in traffic but you’re not paying more for that so since we weren’t in any sort of hurry anyway, it was beautiful.

There are a few separate grades of buses, the old red ones with fans and open windows, some green or cream ones with AC, and the newest ones, which are blue, electric, and beautiful. Lucky for us bus #4 was one of those, but since it wasn’t the usual Bangkok furnace weather any of those would have been just fine.

All electric, brand spankin' new, air-conditioned. What a bus.

Shot from the bus. All of those pots are full of different curries and such. Bruce loves this kind of Thai food. You just point and they will either put some over rice on a plate or fill a plastic bag for you to take away.

Off the bus and walking towards the ferry pier.

You see something interesting every few meters in Bangkok.

The ferry pier is pretty much straight ahead.

We bounced out of our bus and walked to the pier with a temple pee stop along the way. There is a little kiosk where you pay the round-trip fare to Bang Kachao, get on a wooden boat, and get off again five minutes later.

The rental bike selection was not inspiring but we got the cheapest cruisers because they had baskets we could put our bags in and off we went. Our own bikes fit us perfectly, run like tops, and are like our own arms and legs to us now. These bikes felt completely weird and I rode like it was my second day ever on a bicycle. Wobble wobble.

But the island (technically probably not a real island, just a big isolated bend in the river) did have some roads and more cars on those roads than we’d anticipated. It’s very lush, there are lots of little coffee shops and restaurants catering to the bikey tourists, and since it was a nice day we saw a lot of other people wobbling around on their janky bikes as well.

One of the attractions for me of Bang Kachao were the walkways connecting entire villages and homes, I’d watched YouTube videos of people riding around on those through a virtual jungle and it looked like fun. And maybe on my own familiar bike it would have been but on this bike, well, I hated it! I simply could not calm down enough to ride on a four foot wide slab of concrete above a mangrove swamp. It freaked me out!

I felt a little more confident with the sides fenced.

Bruce did better than I did, but it wasn’t long before I forced him to abandon the adventure walkways and stick to the roads. And he made the completely accurate assessment of Bang Kachao to me: “This isn’t that different from about 80% of our trip so far.”

So true! We’re usually on the smallest roads we can find, surrounded by trees and birds and farms and lush growing things with the occasional car or tractor coming around the bend.

There's a bird-watching tower in the middle of the Green Lung that's pretty fun.

There's a cool walking bridge over water too, but we saw very little wildlife here, just a few fish.

A random shrine on Bang Kachao with Indian statues of gods and goddesses.

Mystery plant with fragrant white flowers and large seed/fruits.

There are thousands of these pretty crappy bikes to rent on Bang Kachao.

On the ferry back to Bangkok. The ferry ride is all of five minutes.

But I don’t want to undermine the value there is to having the Green Lung breathing in and out in the middle of 605 square miles of concrete jungle. And for people who don’t get to ride around the countryside like we do it must be like a dream. A dream you can get to by jumping on an electric bus and a wooden boat and swinging your leg over a rusty bike with gummy gears and taking off through the green. In that dream, there is no fear of wobbling off into a watery spiky monitor-lizard-infested soup, and in that dream if you practice enough, you maybe take off flying.

Today's ride: 6 miles (10 km)
Total: 1,034 miles (1,664 km)

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