Cycling through the City of Angels

BANGKOK — They call Bangkok the City of Angels, and when I first thought about signing up for one of Co van Kessel's bike tours, I hoped they'd be watching out for us.

Bangkok bike-friendly? How could it be? This isn't Beijing or Shanghai. It's possible to spend hours stuck in traffic. No one rides a bike unless it's to pull a fruit cart or sacks of vegetables.

Yet here we are at 8 a.m. inside the parking garage of a hotel in Chinatown, adjusting the seats on one-speed bikes with hand brakes. Van Kessel, a Dutch expat who's lived here nearly 30 years, puts the finishing touches on a plan for how the eight of us who have signed up for his tour will spend the next five hours.

"It's like a movie," he says. We won't cycle in traffic. We'll stay off the main roads. We'll ride at walking speed, and spend part of the time aboard river ferries and long-tail boats. Don't worry about being too hot or tired, he says. "Bangkok is completely flat."

Then we're off as he leads the way across a busy street into an alley filled with vendors selling everything from flip-flops to moon cakes.

Chinatown is celebrating its annual Vegetarian Festival this week, and it's a swirl of activity as everyone takes to the streets to eat and prepare special foods.

The only traffic we have to worry about is human. A few times we get off the bikes and portage them though the crowds, lifting them over piles of limes or around women sitting on the ground surrounded by baskets piled with fresh basil and chili peppers.

It's like a movie, all right: a fast-paced movie with split-second scenes, much of it's a blur. And all of this is just in the first half-hour.

Van Kessel, 57, a mountain biker and topographer, started doing his tours 20 years ago, mainly for locals. Work brought him to Thailand, and he loved Bangkok, but he was discouraged that it was gaining a reputation for being a polluted, gridlocked city.

On his bike, he began exploring the footpaths, alleyways and canals between the main thoroughfares. What he found was a world hidden away to most outsiders where life goes on the way it has for decades, much of it in peaceful surroundings more akin to rural villages than a modern city.

Leaving Chinatown, we ride along backstreets until we get to one of the piers along the Chao Phraya River. There a ferry is waiting to take us and the bikes on a five-minute crossing to Thonburi, the capital of Thailand before the king moved his court to the other side of the river in the 1700s.

Now a residential area filled with Buddhist temples and stilt houses, it's a slice of rural Thailand where houses are hidden among canals and waterways connected by miles of raised concrete paths shaded by banana and coconut trees.

"Hello, Hello," people call out to us. Everyone smiles. A woman doing some washing in the water gives us the thumbs-up sign. A man pats the back of my bike, indicating he'd like to get on.

Small boats filled with fruits and vegetables pull up along houses whose front doors face the water. These are Bangkok's "floating markets." Most have died out or have been turned into attractions for tourists on canal boat tours, but the ones we're seeing are real.

Before we set out on our ride, van Kessel urged us not to talk, just soak up the sights and the sounds, and save our questions for rest stops.

Now I'm starting to understand why.

Most of the paths are no wider than three or four feet and surrounded by water or swamp land on both sides.

The other riders on our tour are Dutch. They're used to this kind of biking. But I'm riding cautiously, braking and touching my foot to the ground every few seconds as if I were driving along a mountain pass with no guardrail.

"Does anyone ever fall in?" I ask one of van Kessel's assistants who was riding along with us.

"Yes," she smiled. "Sometimes."

"How often?"

"About four times a year. They're talking, not paying attention."

A few minutes later, someone remarks that we've lucked out with the weather. The sun's not beating down, and it's not raining.

I remind him about the no-talking rule. The movie's not over yet, and so far it's one of the best I've seen in years of traveling. I want to see how it ends.