Thailand

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So we arrived at Bangkok airport and took a taxi for a 60 mile journey, when it cost 10 pounds between us we thought okay, Thailand seems to be pretty cheap. We didn't realise the half of it. Our hotel for our first night was called the Royal Hotel, it was huge, had a pool, was right in the middle of the tourist spots and obviously it had been quite a pretty hotel although it was a tiny touch past its prime and at 20 quid a night we thought we had got a great deal, as it would turn out, there were better deals in Thailand to be had!
On our first day we hit backpackers central a.k.a. Khao San Road. This place was crazy, market stalls, performers, bars etc etc etc. It was also where Charlie discovered apparently the best Chicken Satay skewers in the world. We ended up revisiting this place a few times unsurprisingly! Chris' favourite restaurant of the whole of Thailand turned out to be a backstreet street stall just off of Khao San Road and with pints of beer there being sold for a pound and green curry with rice for even less Chris' appetite was finally settled! Chris had decied he had a licence to eat after losing over a stone on Kilimanjaro!

On our second day we looked into when we should leave Bangkok, we asked to be taken to the governments tourist office, unfortunetely and unsurprisingly the cab driver decided to take us to a travel agents instead who attempted to charge us far more than we thought the buses around Thailand would cost. We eventually walked to the government office and were told the bus tickets at the official government station would cost a quarter of what the cheeky travel agent had tried to charge us!

On our third day we decided to have a few of the local beers and found Chang surprisingly to be far superior to Singha! At 6.4% it was pretty easy to get a touch tipsy! (After the trip we found out the quality control is apparently really poor and some of the Chang's can be 8% or more!) Chris blames this and his weight loss and lack of alcohol on Kilimanjaro for being pretty drunk after only 3 pints!!

It was monsoon season in the South of the country and so we decided that Koh Chang would be the way forward for us!

We arrived in Koh Chang after a lovely 5 hour coach journey with surprisingly good Thai films (according to Chris, which were actually shockingly bad and not even dubbed in English!). Our first destination was White Sand Beach which was a tourist haven. It was nice but a touch too touristy for our tastes, not the picture of Thailand we had in our mind. However, this is the first place we first tasted Thai prawns and our love affair with them began! We had to move on from White Sand Beach as Charlie couldn't swim in the sea due to the harmless jellyfish! There was also a few too many creepy Thai-Western relations, we just don't see what those 50 year old fat ugly men see in those pretty Thai 18 year olds?!

We moved down to Khlong Prao Beach after a few days at White Sands. This plae was absolutely amazing, like a home from home! We mainly stayed at two places, the first of which was Blue Lagoon which is the room in the very cool pictures we took and put on up online. Our room was literally on the water and even had a hiccuping dog with whom Charlie felt a close link. The man who ran the resort called Ouer was a really lovely man and a pleasure to see everyday!

Our second but main home from home was a place called Boon-ya. The rooms were less than 10 pound a night between us and came with a swimming pool, lovely owners, a great location and Lucky the dog!

In Koh Chang we got quite addicted to fishing (especially night fishing!). Chris within 10 seconds of casting the first rod of his life caught a fish which is to date still the biggest fish he has ever caught! However the real star of the show and all the fishing trips was Barry who was helped out of the water by Charlie and her trusty rod! Barry was a rather large (and tasty!) barracuda! The lovely people at Boon-ya said that they would cook anything we caught. They ended up bringing out 4 plates of Barry in different forms, he was in soup, fried and doused in sweet and sour sauce. Poor fella, he was just so god dammed tasty!

Another interest was found in Koh Chang for Charlie. Her love of cricket went so far as waking up at 6am each morning to walk miles in our pilgramage to watch the Ashes in the "local" bar! Anyone with a cricket interest will understand why England's 517-1 perked up Charlie's interest in the great game! This interest was furthered by playing her first game of cricket on the beach with all of the British ex-pats in Koh Chang. Her first game ended up in victory with her making an important 6 runs in the second innings to help her team to victory! To be perfectly honest the standard wasn't great, but watching middle aged men who could barely play argue constantly and throw their teddies in the corner was pretty funny! They thought Charlie was a pretty quick bowler and asked Chris if he was a semi professional cricketer, there could be no greater indicator of the low standard of the matches!

After a few weeks in Koh Chang we made our way back to Bangkok. The journey to Bangkok from Koh Chang involved a ferry and also our most humourous encounter of a ladyboy (there were many...). Chris went to the shop on board to buy a microwavable pot noodle (authentic Thai version, I promise!). He was expecting the slightly musclely lady to immediately ask what he would like. Instead he had to wait whilst the very muscley lady finished plucking her(?!) tash! Chris was more than slightly disturbed, especially when she responded with a voice more closely resembling Barry White than a young woman.

Whilst in Bangkok Charlie bought a pretty little red toshiba laptop which has a pink button to turn it on and off much to her delight! Chris was delighted as Charlie's little Toshiba was destined to stream Ashes for most of its time being used in Thailand! Whilst back in Bangkok we went to the simply crazy and daunting Chatuchak market, which was made of thousands and thousands of stalls! We were told if you see something you like, buy it because if you walk off and try to come back to it you'll never find it again! Great advice!

Whilst we were back in Bangkok we needed to decide where to go next... this caused a few dilemmas as all the south Islands we were intially planning to visit were flooded and had big storms over them for the next couple of weeks 😞 So a no go there. We didn’t have enough money to pay for a trip to explore the north part of the country so that left us with the option of the north east islands to go and chill out on for the rest of our stay. Where did we end up? Back in Koh Chang!

By this point we felt pretty silly, we made a huge fuss of staying goodbye to everyone we had met already just to see them again a week later! We soon got past that though as we took a Swedish/Norwegian couple under our wing and we became their personal tour guides for the rest of our stay in return for their friendship! We took them to Boon-ya, went fishing with them, showed them the beach and went double dating at the best cheap restuarants! It was nice to talk to someone aside from each other! In return they invited us to watch the ski biathlon on euro sports. It wasn’t quite as good as the handball we got interested in from the whole period in Thailand (we even met the Thai handball coach!) however Charlie felt closer to our Scandinavian friends for their love of an unrecognised sport.

It was a nice couple of last weeks to finish our stay in Thailand. We concluded that Thailand was more of a holiday rather than a travelling experience. Even though Thailand is incredibly cheap, we couldn’t really afford to do much apart from the odd fishing trip in order to save money for Oz and New Zealand. Not that we were complaining, beautiful beaches, gorgeous weather and delicious cheap food every night, everyone says its clichy to go to Thailand but if that puts you off going there then your a fool. Sure you get the really annoying hippy travellers with the dreadlocks, tatoos and smoking weed 24/7, all claiming their doing something different yet look all the same and end up in the same places but this can be easily avoided. And the Thai people are so lovely, genuinely some of the nicest people we have ever met and making the time time we spent here full of smiles and laughter.

We definetly would love to come back, thats for sure.

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