Day 266 - "Any DVD you like, just wait for me to burn it"

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After breakfast we waved farewell to Meredith and wished her safe travels back to the US. Then we hit the market at Chatuchak, following the good advice of Stuart and Nicola. It’s an incredible place, mostly because it’s massive, and getting lost is definitely part of the experience. You can buy basically anything in there, including a surprisingly wide range of live animals. It’s lucky that we’re backpacking and live a long way from Bangkok because we could have bought an awful lot of stuff if getting it home wasn’t such a stumbling block. They even have little old ladies without shoes on to take your water bottle off you once you’re finished to save you finding a bin. Now that’s service.....

We went for a ride on the Skytrain, perhaps the only bit of Bangkok that’s clean and cool. Gemma had one of her increasingly frequent ‘need sushi’ moments so that’s of course where we ended up. What we ate we have no idea though.

Our next destination after Thailand is Cambodia so we want to watch the film ‘The Killing Fields’ ahead of this. We asked in a couple of shops if they stocked the DVD but without success, and were pointed in the direction of a tiny stall. Un-optimistically we asked, and he said ‘Yes’ before even understanding what film we were after. Basically he has got everything. Not exactly in stock, but 20 minutes later we were the proud new owners of a couple of hot-off-the-press DVDs at £1 each. Obviously it was actually our friends who did this and not us at all - we didn’t want any part in such a flagrant abuse of anti-piracy laws.

Hot and bothered, we reinvigorated our mood with a couple of hours at the hotel’s rooftop pool, watching some kite fighting in the skies above the park. Bangkok does attract some strange people and Ed was in a minority of roughly one - people without tattoos that is. The average number of tattoos must have been about 20 given the addiction some people have to the tattooist’s lair. The craze for having one arm and one leg completely covered in artwork isn’t purely an Aussie phenomenon after all. There were a number of people who’d gone for this approach, all with predictably silly-looking results. Anyway, enough of these ’Ed is 29 going on 59’ opinions.

We caught a river taxi downtown at sunset to get to the train station via a very colourful and hectic Chinatown. The railway station staff were exceptionally helpful and sorting everything out there is so straightforward, which we weren’t really expecting from somewhere so popular with travellers (the usual effect of this is lots and lots of people wanting your attention and your money). And after Thai curry in the food hall at the station - a Lonely-planet recommendation - we caught a tuk-tuk home. This is a scary-as-hell tricycle motorbike with 3 wheels and 2 seats at the back. Going around bends it only has 2 wheels though. We’d scooped £14 million on the lottery but the best and most unexpected news today was that our tuk-tuk delivered us safely to the Khao San Road, and we settled in for an educational evening watching ‘The Killing Fields’ in our room. (A very good film in many ways, just try to put out of your mind the 80s soundtrack and occasionally woeful acting, and the fact that John Malkovich is in it.)

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