Tuk-Tuk Tour: Finding the Best Street Food in Bangkok

If you ever find yourself hungry or bored in Bangkok… you’re doing it wrong! Whilst in Thailand this past couple of weeks, we’ve had the pleasure of working with Topdeck as part of the Ultimate 49 campaign, to experience the Street Eats Tour;  a culinary and cultural tuk-tuk tour that forms day 2 of the 3 Day Stopover in Bangkok.

The tour is fairly well-equipped, with hotel accommodation provided and a full itinerary of street food destinations to visit within a 3 hour time slot.

Before we really knew it, we were whisked away on a tuk-tuk into the city!

The evening was fairly intimate, with just our guide, Neng, and two other booked travellers — who were just as eager (and hungry) to experience Bangkok as we were.

Check out my street photography vlog from the same night, sharing some behind the scenes details on how we captured these images!

Make sure you subscribe to my channel for more travel photography videos and continue reading to catch all the photos from the night!

We’d previously been to Bangkok for a few days last year and knew all about the tuk-tuks and how much fun they were. But there was something incredibly comforting knowing that our Topdeck tuk-tuks were well aware of our itinerary and knew exactly where they were going. Bangkok is notoriously bad for rush hour traffic in the evenings, but our route on this particular evening seemed fairly open. This was either pure luck, or part of the planning and efficiency of the tour.

It was a pretty full-on evening at a rapid pace, but we somehow managed to squeeze in a total of 7 stops throughout the night.

The first of our stops was just a mere 5 mins away from the hotel pick up point. As the light was starting to fade away for the evening, we got a glimpse into the local life of Bangkok residents at primetime dinnertime.

Neng directed us straight to a couple of recommended stalls for a huge portion of mango sticky rice and a hot chicken on a stick, that was just utterly incredible. Elly’s more of the food connoisseur between us, and I could definitely tell she was above and beyond her element with that chicken!

She’s still going on about that chicken now…

What literally felt like a minute’s tuk-tuk ride away, we suddenly found ourselves at the second market for the evening. Somehow, the sun had disappeared almost entirely.

The bright lights of each market stall guided us down the road towards heaps of fresh rambutan fruits — a tropical delight, often featured within articles titled along the lines of “Top 10 Weirdest Looking Fruit on Earth” 😂

Stop #3 was a dinky little restaurant, serving, you guessed it, rotis and matabas among many other curries of Thai, Malaysian and other origins. By this point, I think we were all feeling pretty full with the amount of food we’d already been provided. But our fears of having to stuff our faces to the brim, were relinquished when we saw the sample-sized meals provided for us to share.

We were in and out within 20 minutes, but that was still long enough for me to develop a deep connecting love with their Massaman curry and roti. The red curry flavour was exactly my kind of dish. I personally wasn’t too fussed by the mataba, but I could sense Elly was pretty keen on it. I guess between us, it sums us up quite well — I’ll take the spicy meats and she’ll have the veggie flavours!

The final food stop of the evening was the legendary Thipsamai Phathai; a pad thai joint so famous, there’s a lengthy queue at all times!

Whilst waiting for a table, I found myself watching the many, many, members of staff keeping everything running smoothly and efficient. Granted everyone appeared to be making the same dish, but it seemed to run like clockwork!

Thinking we were just going to have a final tasting session before the close of the night, we were all a bit shocked and overwhelmed to be provided with a full meal. Each!

You could tell they were incredibly proud of their dish and wanted everyone to experience as much as they could, but it was just a little too much if I’m being truly honest. Especially given the fact that we’d already had an abundance of food beforehand! Luckily they let us take our leftovers home in some take-away bags to ravage through later…

Just a few blocks up the road, we reached the flower market in what seemed to be peak time. It was absolutely bustling with activity.

We honestly weren’t sure where to point our cameras half of the time!

I found myself taking loads of photos in all directions, as every shopfront and bunch of flowers seemed to catch my eye wherever I looked. We only walked through the market for a few minutes though, which was a shame.

I think we both could have easily spent a whole night there photographing the evening away.

I guess if you’re not a photographer and weren’t interested in buying flowers, you’d probably be quite happy to just walk through the flower market and experience everything at a happy walking pace. But for us, it was easily our favourite non-food related stop. When we next return to Bangkok, this will definitely be high up on our list of places to revisit!

Our final stop of the night was a relaxing stroll around the famous Wat Pho temple. Compared to the daytime tourism madness and extreme heat; exploring by night was actually very calming. All of the buildings were glimmering in the street lights with their golden roofs and there was literally a clowder of cats at every corner. Neng even brought cat food with her to keep our feline friends’ happily fed too!

To close out our evening with Topdeck, we had a swift Singha across the road on the rooftop bar at Sala Arun, overlooking the skyline and riverside of Bangkok. It was our first chance to properly sit down and absorb everything we’d just covered in the evening and make a start on getting our metabolism into gear, from all the food we’d just eaten!

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Topdeck for hosting us in Bangkok and allowing us to experience their 3 Day Stopover tour, as well as sponsoring this blog post. We managed to see an entirely different side to Bangkok (that we’d previously missed on past trips), in a relatively short space of time.

With the convenience and comfort of knowing that our accommodation, street food expenses and transportation were all covered in the booking; all we really had to be responsible for, was bringing an appetite!

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