Bangkok, Day 1

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The day started with a quite lovely 5:30am wake up, and a taxi to the airport for our 8:55am flight to Bangkok. There’s a lot to do in Hong Kong airport, so we busied ourselves looking around the shops. I was very, very distressed to have to leave behind a bracelet in Tiffany because we were just 200 HK$ short, though soon perked up when John promised he’d get me something from Tiffany in Tokyo at the end of the trip. Oh, and some pancakes from Burger King also helped (I’m a simple girl, really!) 😉 The flight (which was with Cathay Pacific) was only a couple of hours long with no dramas, though I did have an extremely irritating man next to me in the window seat, who kept pushing the call button every five minutes and then blaming me...which got old very quickly. Still, I was excited to be on the way to Bangkok, so I didn’t let it bug me too much. We arrived at 10:30am, got through immigration very quickly, and then headed out into the heat to get a taxi. And wow. I thought the heat in Hong Kong was a lot to handle, but it was nothing compared to this. There’s no real way to describe it, except for (again) wow. We hopped into a taxi, and started on the pretty long journey to our hotel. It’s supposed to take 40 minutes or so, but the traffic getting into the centre of the city was the worst I have ever experienced, and it ended up taking closer to two hours. We were both feeling pretty tired, and a bit apprehensive about what Bangkok was going to be like, as it was immediately obvious that it was going to be very different to Hong Kong. The crazy traffic, the smog over the huge buildings, the crowded trucks on the roads...it was a different world. And for some reason, I had always expected that Bangkok would be a little scary (maybe because most of the images I’d seen of the city were of Patpong, with its seedy nightlife), though obviously, not scary enough to put me off going! Anyway, we finally made it to our amazing hotel, the Majestic Grande, at about 1pm. The staff were very friendly (though all the bowing took a bit of getting used to!) and our room was gorgeous-probably the best I’ve ever stayed in (again, we were upgraded to a Grande Deluxe room). AND they gave us a free strawberry/vanilla cake and card to celebrate our honeymoon too. I think I’ll just tell everyone it’s our honeymoon on every trip we take from now on. So we ate the cake, had a short nap, before finally going out into the city at about 3pm.

Again, I was feeling a little nervous about what the city would hold for us, but that totally disappeared within about thirty seconds of leaving the hotel. I loved Bangkok immediately. The little street from our hotel to Sukhumvit Street was full of little stalls selling exotic fruits and Thai delicacies, scooters zipping past us on the pavements, tuk-tuk drivers harassing us...ummm, Toto, we’re not in Newcastle anymore! Then we reached Sukhumvit, one of the busiest streets in the city, which was again packed with stalls selling everything you can imagine. The pavements were falling to pieces, the traffic alongside us was mindblowingly mental, the humidity was insane, it was all incredibly intense, and we just soaked it all up and fell in love immediately. I think it was because it really felt like we were in a different world to home. Hong Kong was awesome, but so incredibly westernised, whereas this was real, South-East Asia. It was so real. Bangkok is obviously a city containing a lot of poverty, and this isn’t hidden and tucked away like in a lot of major cities, but right in front of you, everywhere you turn. And despite it all, the people are unnervingly polite, never getting too pushy or making us feel unsafe. It’s an amazing place, it really is, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt such an instant connection with any city like I did there. We walked for about half an hour down Sukhumvit, taking everything in, until we reached Central World. This was at the start of a section of the city which is admittedly more westernised than the rest, though even then with the heat and the crowds, it’s impossible to trick yourself into believing you’re anywhere else but southern Asia. There wasn’t much of any interest at Central World (Bangkok Fashion Week was on, though it seemed to be winding down for the day when we arrived), so we continued onto the Siam shopping centres, which were a lot busier and filled with recognisable chains. There was also an aquarium (Siam Ocean World) on the basement floor, which we decided to look around, given John’s love for all things under the sea. It wasn’t too bad actually, apart from an appalling behind-the-scenes glass bottom boat tour, which we got free with our entry tickets. It smelt really bad, the glass bottom was actually a tiny square in the bottom of the boat that we couldn’t even see from our positions, and we appeared to just be sailing around the boiler room. I did get to wear a fetching orange lifejacket, but was it worth it? I think not. After that exciting excursion, we watched a live show featuring people dressed up as giant turtles doing song and dance numbers (unfortunately in Thai, but I think we still got the gist of it!), saw a lot of fish and then John made me have my photo taken with a man in an otter suit. Just an ordinary day with the Sinclairs, really. On leaving, we got distracted for a long while by a pop concert on the ground floor of Siam Paragon, which had lots of teenage girls (and a surprising amount of 25-30 year old men) in a state of extreme excitement. I have no idea who was performing, but he was actually pretty good, and it was obvious why all the girls were fainting over him. If it was 14 year old me standing there, I’d have been joining in! John really loved him lol, to the extent that he was looking for his CD the rest of the time we were in the city (though I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was for memory’s sake, and not because he couldn’t live without that particular brand of sentimental pop music!). When we finally got bored of watching him, we had a bit of a wander around the mall, heading all the way up to the top floor, which was very, very high...it was mainly full of furniture shops, so we were about to go back down, when who should run by us? Our new favourite Thai popstar, surrounded by about ten bodyguards! Bit of an overreaction, I think, as at no point did we see a trail of screaming girls running after him, but it was all quite exciting anyway! Realising that nothing else Siam Paragon had to offer was going to top that, we went back down and crossed over a footbridge to Siam Square, which was full of more interesting little shops and boutiques. We were getting very hungry, so decided to hunt down the Hard Rock Cafe (I know, our culinary adventures really do know no bounds!), only to find ourselves completely unable to figure out where we were. We must have looked quite helpless, as a really sweet lady came up and asked if we needed any help, before chatting to us for a while. She was completely blown away by John’s pale skin and freckles lol, which he wasn’t sure to be pleased or offended by, and she gave us some advice on the best things to see in the short time we were there. Again, just proof of how great a place Bangkok is! 😊

We finally found HRC, and stuffed our face with burgers (John was very happy at this point, after eating nothing but our honeymoon cake since leaving Hong Kong!), before heading back over to the Siam malls (oh, and on the way, we devised a game which was to keep us occupied for the rest of our time there; the basic idea was ‘Who can spot the most Thai brides?’. Honestly, the amount of gorgeous young Thai women walking around with old British/American men was quite shocking, lol. By the time we got back to the hotel that night, we were already at about 8-8). There were quite a few advertising stalls set up outside one of the malls, giving away small cups of this really weird fruit juice, so we amused ourselves by helping ourselves to as much of that as we could get away with (it was HOT! We needed refreshment!), until it started to rain a little and we decided to make our way back to the hotel.

However, as on our first night in Hong Kong, this proved easier said than done, lol. The traffic seemed to be easing off a little, so we decided to get a tuk-tuk back. We negotiated a cheap price, settled in for a nice ride...and then the heavens really opened. A proper tropical rain shower. As it turns out, tuk-tuks provide limited protection from the weather, so we were drenched within about ten seconds. And of course, once the rain started, the traffic went insane again, so we ended up sitting in the tuk-tuk for close to an hour, getting wetter, and wetter, and wetter... Eventually, we ended up a street away from the hotel, but due to a combination of flooding and bad traffic, we were going nowhere fast, so we decided to hop out and walk the rest of the way (giving the rather stressed driver some extra baht for his time!). Unfortunately, on getting about halfway down the street towards our destination, we found that it was flooded almost up to our knees, and there was absolutely no way of getting through. Oy. We headed back and decided to walk up the next street, assuming there would be a throughway at some point that we could cross...turns out we were quite wrong. We’d been walking for about fifteen minutes when we realised there was absolutely no way we could get to our street from where we were, and were actually just walking down the side of a pretty major motorway. I think this was the point where John decided he was never going to trust me to plan our first night in a new city ever again, as it almost always leads to disaster, lol. We had to turn back (luckily it had stopped raining at this point), and luckily when we tried again to reach the hotel, we found the waters had receded just enough to let us get through (with the help of a lot of telephone poles to swing on!). We finally got back to the hotel at about 10pm, looking like drowned rats, and discovered that had we just rang the hotel, they would have sent a golf buggy through the flooded street to help us get back. Well, pfffft. Where’s the fun in that?! 😉 When we made it back to our room, we had another surprise of a box of chocolates, which I promptly stole from John’s greedy eyes and took into the bathroom to enjoy with a nice, long, well-earned bubble bath!

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