Exploring Bangkok's Airplane Graveyard

I love visiting abandoned places and Bangkok's airplane graveyard has been an insider tip among backpackers for a while. When I first heard about it a couple of months ago, I planned on heading there on my next visit to Bangkok, but when I visited Bangkok ten days ago I had totally forgotten about this place. All the better that I ended up there by accident!

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But let me start from the beginning: Having just arrived from Copenhagen the day before, I was a bit jet-lagged on my second day in Bangkok. The beers I had had with @travelling-two and @worldcapture at our meet-up the evening before might have also been in play there, but when I finally woke up at noon it was raining outside and by the time the rain had stopped and I finally left the hostel, it was already 4 pm. Since I was staying in Bangkok only as a layover, I had chosen a hostel outside of the centre with a convenient connection to both airports. I have visited Bangkok's popular tourist sights on my last trip to Thailand in 2016 already, but since I had no other plans for the day, I decided to head to the touristy centre of Bangkok anyway.

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With the bad traffic in Bangkok, it is best to avoid the streets and use other ways of transport. This is why I headed to the nearby stop of the Klang channel boat. I boarded the first boat that came by and with a look on my phone's GPS I realised that it was not moving towards, but away from the centre. I was curious to which parts of Bangkok the boat would take me, so I filtered my map app for "sights" and scrolled along the channel. I came across something interesting, a place marked as "airplane graveyard". I remembered reading about this place before in a #travelfeed post some months ago and how I had wanted to got here, so I staid on the "wrong" boat and got off at the last stop. After getting lost in the monastery adjacent to the boat stop, I found the way to the airplane graveyard after a few minutes. I could spot two planes over a fence, but was a bit disappointed when I saw a sign reading "No entry". Was it no longer possible to visit the airplane graveyard?

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I should have known better. This is not Europe, this is Thailand, so I would not have had to worry and indeed a few seconds later a guy came to the gate and demanded an entrance fee bribe of 200 Baht (around 5€). He and his family live at the airplane graveyard in a barrack in quite poor conditions, but they certainly have my respect for recognising the opportunity of earning from tourism and so I paid the fee and went through the gate and found myself surrounded by airplane corpses as the only visitor.

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The rain earlier in the day had turned the meadow into a muddy swamp. I quickly gave up trying to keep my feet dry and walked through the knee-deep grass to reach the smaller airplane corpses in the back of the graveyard.

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When I finally left the airplane graveyard, the sun had already set and in the last light of the day I made my way back to the Klong boat station only to find out that there were no more boats running. I would have loved to fly back to my hostel in one of the abandoned planes, but since they didn't look like they would ever fly again, I realised that my only way of getting back to my hostel would be to make my way through busy Bangkok's traffic.

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I asked some locals and they advised me to take a bus with a certain number, but when this bus came along, the driver denied going in the direction of my hostel.

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Since I was staying near the BTS skytrain station Phaya Thai, I looked for the BTS station closest to my location and when another bus with a different number came along, I asked for this station instead and indeed I got lucky. On the bus, a Thai guy who spoke English asked me where I wanted to go and it turned out that the bus route had a stop just a couple of hundred metres away from my hostel where I arrived after some time in Bangkok's traffic that due to the public holiday was much better than I had anticipated.