As you can see, tourism has had a big impact on the market. It's still a remarkable sight, but it also becomes increasingly clear this is a weird way to trade things. When the idea was selling stuff by paddling your boat to waterside houses, makes perfect sense. Now it's switched largely to getting tourists on boats, paddling them up and down the river while ladies on other boats sell them things. This makes very little sense, as both buyer and seller have to move from their natural, land-based habitat onto boats to conduct their business. Also, as you can see, trading this way causes boat gridlock, as you can imagine. To use a Monroe example, imagine if instead of stores, you had to drive up and down Route 111 and buy and sell with drivers coming in the opposite direction. As you haggled over the price and wrapped up your merchandise, there's be quite a pileup of honking cars from behind.

But the clearest indication that the market has gone off track is the photo of the house selling tourist kitsch. Now the roles have completely reversed, as the buyers get in the boat and get paddled to the sellers, who sit in the house. So I'd still go because it's so photogenic, but don't think too much about the commercial logic of a floating market, because there isn't any.

35. Damnoen Saduak, Thailand May '99

A bit of confusion here. My father and sister came to visit me in Bangkok for a week, around this time, and we definitely drove to Damnoen Saduak to see the famous floating market. And I remember seeing photos of Aimee, or Pomme as she's known here, with a monkey on her head at the market. But these pictures don't have any family in them, so I think I went here with Somchai around the same time. But when I say this to Somchai, he denies ever having been here, with the same look on his face that a New Yorker might have when you ask them if they've ever been on a Circle Line tour. My original blog inclusion rule was to include only places where we went together, so I may be breaking that rule in the (unlikely) event Somchai's right.

Damnoen Saduak is a small village two hours' west of Bangkok and a good example of what Bangkok looked like until all the canals were paved over not too long ago. As you can see, the village sprouted along the river and canals, so the floating market was a logical outcome. All day long, women stock their boat with food and general merchandise, and sell it to each other or to the residents of the waterside houses. There are lots of places like this in Thailand, but there's a tradeoff at work. The floating markets very close to Bangkok are completely fake and for the tourists' benefits only. Those far from Bangkok are, well, far, so too much work to get to. Damnoen Saduak is just far enough that it still preserves some authenticity, but it's still a manageable day trip. Having said that, there are lots of tour buses that roll into town around 9 am, which tips the balance pretty far away from authenticity, so you really need to get there at the crack of dawn.