For nearly 100 years, vendors at Damnoen Saduak Floating Market, located about 65 miles southwest of Bangkok, paddled placid waterways in a spectacle that remained unchanged until the market was discovered by the outside world in the mid-1960’s. Overnight, tour operators capitalized on the new attraction, providing easy access with bus tours that delivered hundreds of foreign visitors to the floating market each morning. Today the pageantry is performed solely for tourists, yet snatches of authenticity surface from beneath the tourist veneer when women in wide-brimmed straw hats stop in mid-stream to gossip or call out to friends on the shore, waving and smiling effusively. To read more about my round-the-world travels, visit my blog, holeinthedonut.com.