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Published: November 18th 2008
At long last the travels now begin...
Bangkok is very hot and bustling with tons of people. Stupidly busy place! Bit of a crazy town really. We stayed on Khaosan Road, right bang in the middle, where there is plenty to do. The street is filled from side to side with so many market stalls and little 'hole in the wall' styly shops that you just don't know where to start. The locals love to try capture you and squirrel you off into their own little shops, and annoyingly hand everything you happen to momentarily glance at over and tell you how authentic and wonderful it is. They can always give you a "good price" and funnily enough, it was always specially for us (awwww sweet). All the shops sold pretty much the same things! So once you'd seen one section of the street, you'd seen most of them.
We stayed here for 3 nights. On the first night, we were knackered, but bravely trooped on and got ourselves out in amidst all the hot sticky chaos. All I wanted to do was shop shop shop, but even I have to admit I was a little overwhelmed by it
all, and we both settled to go for a nice (VERY hot - red chilies everywhere!) meal and a few drinks instead. And the drinks continued......the first bar we decided to go into was great, really quiet - but I think everywhere here is until about 11pm - and we were uber impressed, that right there, in the middle of the bar was a great whopping CLIMBING WALL!! (Clearly no strict H&S regulations here then) Steven was well up for giving it a go later on after several drinks - I however, was not so convinced that it was! I'd damage myself sober, let alone drunk! Haha! We sampled the local beer - Chang - which was very nice.
So we moved on, and ended up finally in this really lovely little bar that smelt beautifully of incense (they burn the stuff everywhere here - no idea how much the country as a whole must spend on it). We got chatting to the local bartenders there about Bangkok and what its like. One of the guys was telling us all about the political protests that had been going on here not long before we arrived, and how the tourist
industry was starting to slack off a bit because of it. All the bars and restaurants were feeling the effect a little. We also got chatting to one of the girls, who taught us some of the language - speaking to a girl you say "ka" but for a boy it is "krap" - which I of course found hilarious! And hello is "za-wat-tee" and goodbye "la-gon". So we were pros as you can imagine! Several drinks later (Steven wanted to stay for ages because his red-bull substitute drink was so unbelievably cheap) we eventually decided to move on. We bumped into a really great Austrian (I think) couple who were here on some business, and we all mooched up into an upstairs bar with a bit of live music. All the little bars here are really weird - you have to go through closed cafes and everything just to get to them, they're dotted all over the place! Eventually we managed to stagger back home and sleeeeeeeeeppppp...ahhhhh so nice!
The rest of the time in Bangkok was mainly going around all the stalls and so on. We did visit a massive shopping complex - MBK - which was
a bit strange being in the middle of all the dust and poverty you see in main Bangkok streets. There were plenty of places to eat - little stalls dotted all round the streets selling noodles - and of course Leah got to eat in her obligatory McDonalds!! Woo.
Overall we would describe What we saw of Bangkok as hot, overwhelming and not very H&S concious! Hehe. I would love to go back again, but to see more of the beautiful aspects of Thailand, not so much the bigger cities.
Onward and upward to Singapore next - CANNOT WAIT!!
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