Return to Bangkok

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Back to Bangkok!

Making our own way from the border with Cambodia we jumped in a tuk tuk to take us to the bus station and jumped on a local bus to Bangkok, not for the first time on our travels we were the only non local people making the journey!

A few hours later and we were back in the hustle and bustle and smell of Bangkok, this time the smell seamed a lot stronger but the traffic now calmer after seeing the chaos in Vietnam. The first night back we had booked a hotel for a night to give us our first break from hostels, however the bath that Carly wanted did not appear to be in our hotel although advertised and the WiFi was much worse than many of the hostels we had stayed in. A night of luxury just turned out to be a disappointment. The next day we used the BTS Skytrain for the first time as our previous time in Bangkok we were in the older district on the west side of Bangkok so didn't get a chance. We were impressed, the price was reasonable, it all ran on time and the nicest thing was the A/C!

After checking into our hostel we took the BTS Skytrain back up to their central shopping plaza. This consisted of 4 shopping malls all connected by skywalks and bridges. I don't know how many shops and stalls in total but I think the MBK centre had 7 floors of stalls and shops just by itself! We walked til our feet could take no more and I think the only thing we bought was a new memory card for Carly's camera.

The next day was pretty much a write off. We had decided our next leg would be to Koh Phayam which would involve getting a night bus to Ranong. To do this we would need to get to Bangkok's southern bus terminal and we would need to go book some tickets as well as these journeys do sell out. The guy at our hostel said we could get there just by catching the 511 bus from just up the road. This was fine and we actually got on the bus quite easily and paid for out ticket there with no problem. Now we knew the journey was a long one as we had to cross the whole of Bangkok to get to the terminal and we were told on the bus it was quite far, but we had nothing else to do that day and we needed to book some tickets, so we thought we would just enjoy the ride. We did not make it to the terminal and the only enjoyable thing from that journey was getting off. Oh and talking to a Thai woman who was teaching English and the woman she was with was an Indian woman and it was her first day of learning English, she was thrown in at the deep end being told by her teacher to speak to me and Carly! They both said that Carly was very beautiful and she had perfect teeth, no compliments about me. The traffic in Bangkok was so bad that after 2 hours on the bus it felt like we had only gone 2 miles. Eventually we made it to the Khoa San Road area where we stayed previously and decided to get off and book some bus tickets through a travel agent. That at all went fine however we knew when we had to leave Bangkok we would still have to make our way to the bus terminal!

A quick note about the food we were eating back in Bangkok, with out hostel located next to a massive Tesco we discovered a big food court inside where a lot of locals went to eat and with the extremely low prices it was easy to see why! A fried green curry with rice cost about 80p and a large coke (think of the biggest size you get in the cinema in the UK) was 50p.

After finishing our time in Bangkok we checked out our hostel and set about getting to the bus terminal. We decided we would take a taxi and avoid the bus route. Lucky for us the protests had started again that day and so no taxi driver wanted us! On the sixteenth attempt of asking a taxi to take us one finally agreed! The journey seemed to be going fine and we were making great progress until we hit traffic again! This journey to the bus terminal should normally take 45 minutes. Our bus attempt took 2 and a half hours and we were nowhere near the bus terminal before we got off, our taxi attempt ended in successfully getting there but it took 2 hours! Lucky with Thai prices that 2 hour taxi journey only cost £4!

So bye bye Bangkok and our island hopping was about to begin.

PS no photos in this one for now as they are on Carly's camera so we'll upload them when we can.

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