Mahachai Market
Seafood Port Market At The Mouth Of The Tha Chin River; The Terminus Of The First Section Of The Maeklong Railway · Samut Sakhon, Samut Sakhon
Mahachai is the old name, still used by everyone, of the town of Samut Sakhon, a busy fishing port where the Tha Chin river meets the Gulf of Thailand, about an hour south-west of central Bangkok. Its market, spreading from the railway station to the fish piers on the riverbank, is one of the great seafood markets of central Thailand: tubs of live prawns and crabs, fish laid on ice, mounds of dried squid, shrimp and salted fish, shrimp paste, and stalls grilling seafood over charcoal. Mahachai is also the end of the first section of the Maeklong railway, and the slow local train from Wongwian Yai in Bangkok runs right into the market, whose stalls crowd the tracks. From the piers a small ferry crosses the river to Tha Chalom, where a second line continues from Ban Laem to Maeklong. The town is home to a large community of workers from Myanmar in the fishing and seafood industries, and around it lie salt fields, shrimp ponds and mangroves. It is hot, fishy and real, and best early.
Mahachai, Mueang Samut Sakhon, Samut Sakhon, Samut Sakhon, 74000, Thailand
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The typical pattern: the wholesale landing and trade at the piers run from before dawn, roughly 4 or 5 am, to about 9 am; the retail seafood market and dried-seafood shops open from early morning to about 4 or 5 pm every day; the ferry to Tha Chalom runs from early morning to evening; trains from Wongwian Yai run roughly hourly from early morning to evening, and the Ban Laem trains to Maeklong only a few times a day. The traps that ruin a day are arriving after 10 am when the wholesale action is over, missing the few Ban Laem trains, finding the Maeklong line closed for works and getting stuck in the late-afternoon traffic back to Bangkok. Confirm current times before relying on them.