Anniversary and arrival

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Our wedding anniversary started fairly averagely - we opened our cards, ate breakfast together and them, oh yeah, packed our MASSIVE backpacks ready to leave for our epic adventure to Indonesia - 25 days door to door travelling through Java and Bali. We were very excited as we boarded the train to Heathrow. The night before, I had jokingly suggested that we should take a bottle of champagne on the train to celebrate our anniversary in style. We needn't have worried. 2 men sitting opposite us had bought 2 bottles to drink on their way to a booze "business" meeting. On chatting to us and sharing their first bottle, they discovered it was our anniversary. Congratulations ensued before the second bottle was passed our way with their best wishes. The kindness of strangers never fails to astound me!

An uneventful tube journey later, we were at the airport. Bag drop took minutes - a security line was opened up just as we arrived at it - we breezed through the airport with everything seeming to be in our favour - the travel gods appeared to have been smiling on us today! As an anniversary present to ourselves, we had bought lounge passes for the year and so we made our way to the T3 lounge, where we quaffed prosecco, filled up on the food and generally relaxed in relative calm before the madness of Bangkok and Jakarta began! It was a great anniversary!

The flight with Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong was fine. The lounge we went to at HK airport was great and we managed to rejuvenate before the final leg of the journey to Bangkok. On arrival, we had the option of the train and then a taxi or a direct taxi to the hotel. The train would take 15 minutes followed by a short ride to the hotel and the taxi, as we had experienced on many occasions before, would be around an hour. I was leaning heavily to towards the train. Stacey to the taxi. I reminded her that it was Bangkok rush hour. She was adamant that the taxi was the best route. Stacey won.

Neither of us could consider ourselves winners when we were still in said taxi 2 hours later, crawling through the fume-choked streets, tuk-tuks and bikes weavkng in and out of the gridlocked traffic. Starving, tired, and hot and bothered, we finally arrived at the hotel, where the welcome drinks and air conditioning were much appreciated!

So hungry that we could have eaten our own arms, we dumped our bags and, despite being in transit for over 26 hours, we didn't even freshen up, so great was our need, our craving, our desperation for pad Thai that we had to have it. Now. So, we found a wonderful backstreet stall, recommended on Trip Advisor and minutes from our hotel. Here we finally got the food that keeps pulling us back to Bangkok, 7 years after our first joint visit, and some 15 after my own, the glorious pad Thai. It doesn't matter which restaurant you go to in the UK, pad Thai is never quite the same unless you eat it standing, or sitting on plastic chairs down a dark alleyway with the frenetic traffic noise assaulting your ears and the smells of Thailand mingling with the peanuts and lime. Nothing compares to it. After 15 years of travelling the world, of enjoying food from dozens of different cuisines, it's still pad Thai that calls me over and again, and like a dutiful child, I happily keep responding! The pad Thai was accompanied by a delicious roast duck with Thai holy basil and lashings of Chang beer. The cooking was being done on a huge wok directly opposite the table, the menu written on the wall in marker pen. It was perfect!

What was not perfect was our return to the Khao San Road. I introduced this wonder to Stacey on our first visit here and it's been a place we always return to whenever we transit through Bangkok, enjoying the hustle and bustle (and the Chang Towers, of course!). However, this year, it was unrecognisable. Just 4 years after our last visit, the local, noisy, chaotic bars we knew have gone and been replaced with pizza parlours, pounding music, eye-watering neon lights, slick craft beer joints and AN IBIS HOTEL! We walked up and down the road twice, looking for any part that we recognised, confused when the road curved. Could it be that that we had accidentally wandered down the wrong street? But no, it seems that they have simply actually rebuilt the entire street to accommodate new, multi-national plastic companies and made some of the smaller sois (side roads), leading from the main stretch, join up to create a brand new road. It was awful. So awful, that we didn't even stay for a drink and simply headed back to the sanctuary of our hotel for a blissful night's sleep!

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