A long day spent trying to see as much as we could in Bangkok.

I’m going to have a portfolio of people in Bangkok doing risky things on ladders.

I thought for a moment I might capture a death on camera.

The Golden Buddha at Wat Traimit. Five point five tons of 18k gold worth about half a billion dollars. I found a couple of things interesting here. First, a $500 million work of art that seems to be just sitting out in the open is pretty cool. How often are you close enough to stick a wad of gum on something like that? It sits about 4 stories up at the top of a temple, and since it weighs 5.5 tons I suppose they can be pretty loose with security. Second, it’s kind of amazing that the government hasn’t melted that sucker down. Buy some bonds with $500 million dollars and you’ll be pulling in a solid $20 million or more a year. There’s a lot of tourists coming through these doors, but at a couple dollars each I don’t think they are making a dent in that $20 million number. Kudos to them.

The buddha has a fun story behind it. I won’t go into it too much, but essentially it was covered in plaster to hide it from invading armies and then somehow completely forgotten about. Hundreds of years later everyone thought it was just a heavy plaster statue. When they wanted the building it was in for something else they went to move it, accidentally dropped it, broke the plaster and discovered the gold again. Imagine that?

The temple sits in a very unassuming part of town.

Our fun day out took a turn on our way home. We were in a Grab (Uber of Asia) with an unusually old driver. Up to this point we’d all sort of been in awe of the Bangkok drivers. They are incredible. But with this one we were immediately feeling leary. Ali, in the backseat had just clicked her seatbelt in place when the driver, started asking me which way to go, in Thai, in the middle of a huge intersection, in downtown Bangkok during rush hour. I was looking at him like, “I don’t have the slightest idea, dude.” He was pointing straight or right, straight or right, and I’m saying I don’t know, and then he suddenly veers right… smack dab into the path of a pickup truck. The truck T-Boned us.

Fortunately nobody was speeding—as traffic was pretty heavy—but it gave us a good jolt and scared the heck out of us. Injury-free, we climbed out of the car. A traffic cop was there within a few seconds. Nobody paid any attention to us. I snapped a couple pics and then we got out of there. A few minutes later it occured to me that he had been trying to ask me if he should take the toll road or not. The toll road was straight ahead and cost a dollar. I’d have certainly agreed to reimburse him for the toll, but when he didn’t get an answer from me he decided he couldn’t risk eating the dollar.

Knocked out of our ride home, with the app still thinking we were on a trip, and with no stomach for climbing into another car anyway, we made our way to a nearby subway and mapped out the rest of the trip home.

Things looked up again later that night when we wandered a few blocks down the road to a Mexican place. Risky move, but sometimes nothing sounds better than a taco and a beer. And thankfully, both were amazing.