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Published: April 18th 2009
Cambodia to our surprise was even more expensive to leave than it was to enter. A 30 day visa costs $20 to UK citizens however departure tax (if you choose to leave via plane) is $25 per person…….that hit the budget somewhere in the nether regions but hey who are we to complain, rules are rules!!!
Bangkok is one of our favourite South East Asia cities, it’s hot, busy, dirty at times, the taxi and tuk tuk drivers are hell bent on ripping you off but we like the place a lot. We usually stay either on Khoa San Rd or Soi Rambrutti but this time we decided to stay somewhere a bit quieter so opted for Roof View Place, a lovely small hotel with excellent rooms and free breakfast thrown in for £13 per night. The backpacker hub of Khoa San is a mere 15 minute stroll through some interesting little streets where we enjoyed soaking up the local life of the neighbourhood.
Khao San was it’s usual barmy self…..you can sit and people watch here for hours and never get bored, it’s chaotic, exotic and a little bit cheesy too but for some reason we always find
Klong Taxis
Typical, you wait for hrs then two turn up at once!!ourselves hanging out there for a couple of hours. One thing that we did witness on Khao San this time was a baby elephant being paraded up and down for the benefit of the tourists, we found this really upsetting, we could tell it was a young elephant because of the size of it, it stood at around the same height as Barry, not a nice thing to see on a crowded yob filled street, the poor thing was obviously distressed and the owner charging for photo's of this baby was despicable, which is why its face will not be seen on this blog !!! Ok, rant over !!!
You can eat and drink in and around Khao San for next to nothing, our favourite food is Pad Thai with egg washed down with a couple of Beer Chang for the measly sum of £2.60, then if you fancy something sweet to finish the meal off you can get lovely freshly made pancakes with banana and condensed milk for 40p. Our favourite bars in the Khao San and Rambrutti areas are the pavement variety that roll up on a pushcart at around 8pm, stools are unloaded onto the pavement along
The Golden Mount
Ringing the bells for good Karma with cool boxes, cocktail shakers and thumping sound systems, they all offer cut price alcohol and a great ambience so any one you choose will do.
As always we found ourselves at the MBK shopping mall whilst in Bangkok, we stocked up on sun cream and mossie spray and a few items of clothing for our forthcoming Island Hopping experience. You can buy fake everything in Bangkok but if you want the real stuff you can get that too, shopping here is great and bartering is part of the game, if you can’t get what you want at a reasonable price move on as there are hundreds of shops selling exactly the same stuff. We’ve done the main river boats in the past but never took a boat down the klongs (canals) so to get to MBK we jumped onto a klong taxi and saw a new side to Bangkok life, no traffic jams, no exhausts fumes just the occasional splash. To get to MBK by bus takes around 40mins and costs 7 baht per head, a klong taxi takes 8mins and costs 8 baht. The klong taxis like the buses are frequent and efficient the only real difference
Monks leaving the temple
Taking the long walk down back to street level is that the ticket lady on the klong taxi’s wear crash helmets….this is because of the low bridges crossing the klongs throughout the city; our ticket lady had a near miss with one of the bridges on the way back from MBK. When we first arrived in Bangkok we were told by our taxi driver from the airport that there was some kind of demonstration going on because of the current Prime Minister, the protesters all wear red and are therefore known as “the red shirts”, we saw quite a large gathering of “the red shirts” while we were out and about in Bangkok.
After the klong ride from MBK we went to have a look at “The Golden Mount” which is a Buddhist temple built on a hill in the middle of the city, the views from the top are great. We decided to walk back to the hotel but were stopped in our tracks at a large intersection by the police…..don’t worry, it wasn’t just us that were stopped it was everyone, walking, cycling or driving within a half mile radius of a small temple in a park just off Rama VIII road, the reason for the
Stopping the traffic
This is what happens when the King is in town disruption had nothing to do with “the red shirts” it was because The King of Thailand was in town which as we discovered is a very serious business. Thai people love their Royal Family in fact every single home, business and vehicle has a picture of The King displayed on its walls and it is a crime to step on any currency because it has The Kings face on it. As the Kings entourage approached us we were told to stand up and take off our hats and we witnessed everyone around us bowing as the royal Rolls Royce whizzed by. The band struck up a tune and all the police saluted until The King had got out of his car entered the temple park (we couldn’t see this from where we were standing) and got back into the car and whizzed off again………all in a matter of 4 minutes.
Our time in Bangkok came to an end for the time being, we booked ourselves on a minibus and ferry to Ko Samet on Thailand’s eastern gulf coast. Samet has beautiful beaches but not much else to offer. We stayed at Jeps Bungalows on Ao Hin Khok beach (300
Playing for the King
Military bands come out in force baht per night), a beautiful stretch of white sand with turquoise clear sea…..just how we like it. We enjoyed a couple of chilled out days on the beach and ate some nice meals in the beachside restaurants in the evenings whilst watching paper balloons being ignited and sent up into the clear starry skies. One thing that we didn’t like about Samet was the robbing sawngthaew drivers who demanded ridiculous amounts of money to take you a few hundred yards. Sawngthaew’s are small pick up trucks with two bench seats and an aisle running down the centre (supposedly for your legs but usually the aisle is crammed with bags, boxes and sometimes even chickens). Sawngthaew’s are basically share taxis that usually depart for their final destination when the vehicle is full. On some occasions dependent upon the length of the route the driver will depart with just a few passengers onboard and pick up extra passengers along the way, you pay a fixed fee to your destination but sometimes as in this instance you can be the first and only passengers onboard and this is when the drivers go in for the kill!! On our day of departure we jumped
into a passing Sawngthaew to get to the jetty for our ferry to send us on our way to Koh Chang only for him to slam on the brakes after ten yards and demand ten times the price (unless further passengers got on). Bearing in mind the jetty was only 1KM away and even to hire a whole sawngthaew to ourselves for such a short distance should not be so expensive. Anyway the guy keeps looking at his watch and telling us that we’re going to miss the ferry, we in return just kept smiling back and told him that as we didn’t have ferry tickets we could wait all day because we could catch a later boat. In the end we told him to forget it and took a leisurely walk (not so leisurely to be honest with 20kg backpacks) to the pier where we just about made our 8am ferry.
Another day another island, this time Koh Chang further south of Samet. Koh Chang is larger than Samet and has a bit more to it than beaches, in fact we didn’t do the beach at all on Koh Chang, instead we hired a bike and took off
around the island for a few days. We visited fishermen’s villages and explored the countryside, Koh Chang is very lush and hilly and we had a great laugh trying to get the scooter up some of the steeper slopes. All in all we had a lovely few days on the eastern gulf but the Andaman coast was calling…..we’ve been there in the past a couple of times and the scenery is amazing so next we’re off to Ko Lanta via Bangkok.
Hope you enjoy the photo's, to view all other pics click the button at the bottom and go to the second page. To enlarge pics, double click on a pic and view as slide show xxxxx
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