Our second day in Bangkok was by far the least eventful. We spent a good part of the day hanging out at Gateway Ekamai, one of the city’s many “luxury” shopping malls. The top two floors of Gateway Ekamai are dedicated to leisure and learning, with several private schools offering Thai and English language lessons to people of all ages, as well as music, drama and martial arts classes. Alongside the schools are a snow zone offering the people of Bangkok a chance to experience “real” snow and sledging, a video arcade and Stanley MiniVenture, which claims to be “Asia’s largest 1:87 miniature town”!
Our pictures take over the story:
Pretty impressive, huh? The whole “town” (complete with mountain range, glacier, airport and army base) fills several rooms and took us over an hour to fully explore. As well as the model trains and boats, many of which move, some of the people and farm animals are also “animated” – not wandering around town of course, but if you were being very charitable, you could just about say they walk on the spot. I’m not sure it was worth the effort to be honest, but it certainly demonstrates how much has been invested in making this thing look real!
Later on, we paid a visit to another of Gateway Ekamai’s attractions, Ticket to Mystery. Ticket to Mystery is an escape room experience. According to TripAdvisor reviews, in many cities around the world, an escape room is the highest-rated attraction in town. The premise: you are your small team are locked in a room and have 60 minutes to find your way out by finding clues and solving puzzles. Not entirely unlike the Crystal Maze.
We’ve considered taking on an escape room many times before, but they tend to be quite expensive, especially at peak times. What luck then that this was a weekday afternoon in a country where everything costs half what it does back home, and we happened to walk right past Ticket to Mystery without even knowing it was there!
So we handed over our £35 (for two people), and signed up for “Ghost Tower 2035”, one of Ticket To Mystery’s four current challenges. Rated as beginner level, we found the puzzles vary in difficulty quite widely. Some took just a few seconds to solve, while others had us really stumped. Thanks to some very poor map reading on my part, one of the puzzles proved to be a real head-scratcher. Fortunately, there are CCTV cameras in all of the escape rooms, and players’ progress / enjoyment / frustration level is monitored throughout. After several minutes of making no progress at all, our host took pity and provided us with a nudge in the right direction!
We found our way out in just under 50 minutes. Certainly not a record, but it felt like an accomplishment, and we had a lot of fun. Now we’re waiting for another opportunity to take on an escape room, although next time we’ll stack the deck by going in with a bigger team.
