Damnoen Saduak Floating Market is a very unique and tourist-friendly attraction located southwest of Bangkok. You can purchase items here as well as food all while riding on a wooden boat!
Contents
Hours
The market is open everyday from 8AM to 6PM.
Directions
The floating market is about 1.5 hours from Bangkok so you will need get there by car. You can either book a tour that will pick you up and take you there or you can take a Grab taxi (which is what we did).
Admission
Luckily, when we arrived to the floating market there was an English speaking tour guide who helped us rent one of the wooden boats. You need to pay the attendant 1500 baht (~$47 USD) and she will row the boat for you around the market.
Restrooms
There are restrooms that you can use here.
Damnoen Saduak Floating Market
When we were researching Damnoen Saduak Floating Market online the day before we planned to visit, a lot of websites advised us to go earlier to avoid the crowd. Since we were about 1.5 hours away, we decided to leave at 6AM and arrived around 8AM. Turns out, you can get there too early. A lot of the shops were not open yet and you don’t get the same atmosphere since it was pretty empty.
However, we still managed to visit some of the shops on the canal and take some photos as well. Brea even bargained and bought some elephant souvenirs for a good price!
Since we left our Airbnb really early in the morning, we didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast. There are many food places in the floating market so we stopped at one of the shops and bought pad thai. This was the best pad thai we ever had! Brea never tried pad thai before but she fell in love with this dish after this experience.
You can also purchase beers to have with your breakfast!
There are a lot of other things you can see at the floating market too including a small gift shop where you disembark the boat and spend about 15 minutes exploring.
We were done riding in the wooden boat around the market in about an hour and only then were more people starting to arrive. I guess the best time to go would be around 9 to 10AM.
If you are looking for something different to do while visiting Bangkok, then visiting this floating market is something you should definitely make time for. Even though it took more than an hour to get there and we arrived too early, Brea and I still enjoyed ourselves and was able to experience Thai culture.
