Bangkok

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Before arriving in Bangkok, we saw the news of shootings and grenade attacks in the capital because of the unrest and protests of the elections, so we were preparing ourselves to enter some kind of war zone but it was nothing of the sort.

We arrived in Bangkok at about 10pm to extremely humid weather, which was horrible in a massive jumper and leggings! After searching the airport for our taxi driver, we finally found a tiny Thai man grinning and holding a sign saying 'Ella West', yes I'm basically a celebrity now . Unfortunately I also quickly came to the realisation that I couldn't take out money as I hadn't informed my bank of my travels, so obviously when I tried to take money out, they contacted the fraud squad, FANTASTIC start to the trip.

Our hotel that we booked beforehand was on the famous Khaosan Road and we arrived at the time that all the drunk revellers were out and about. We didn't exactly make a great entrance, forcing our way down the road through the crowds of drunks with our HUGE backpacks, smooth. We eventually found our accommodation, Khaosan Palace, which was amazing and boasted a rooftop pool, luxury! Obviously we instantly thought 'Wow this is great, I can't wait to stay in nice, cheap hotels with pools for the next 10 weeks!!!!1', little did we know we'd be sleeping on mattresses on the floor, a hostel room of 41 people and a sweaty bus.

We didn't bother going out out on that night even though we were just above all the action, with a 7-eleven, which soon became our favourite place in the world, right below us. We got up early and went to the pool where other travellers were, we were so shy and significantly younger than them so we couldn't bring ourselves to start a conversation, sad I know. Later in the day we went to book our trip, we had NOTHING planned and this is where it went wrong..

We clearly looked clueless looking for a place to book a bus to Koh Phi Phi and got sucked in by a man who worked for a tourist company, he sent us in the direction of one but we knew his tricks (obviously not) and disregarded him, trying to find our own. Soon after, a man approached us saying he'd kindly walk us to the tourist info as he was conveniently 'picking his son up for school', course we were new to this whole thing and we believed the little man (twat), and being English, we are known for being WAY too polite. We got led to a travel agent which we thought was a tourist info and attempted to book ONE bus and ended up being scammed into paying £300 for our whole Thailand trip to be planned, a woman even followed us to the cash point to get our money out, SO shady. We later put two and two together and realised the man picking his 'son up from school' worked for the travel company and the phone call he received from his 'wife' on the way to the 'school' was actually the guy sitting waiting for us in the travel office.

We quickly learnt that if someone's being nice to you in Bangkok, they aren't actually genuine, they just want something from you.

Me and Yasmin had our first night out on Khaosan road and drowned our sorrows of being scammed out of £300. We went from bar to bar, still shy and nervous until the alcohol got into our system. We later met some boys from Hertfordshire, which is really close to where we live, we chatted to them for a while, I can't remember their names but one slightly resembled Prince Harry. Later in the night we met an extremely drunk traveller who gave us some of his shisha and kindly nicknamed me 'Taylor Swift' because of my curly hair..ha. He was a charming gentleman, wiping his bloody toe which he cut open on some glass on my foot 😊

After experiencing our first, slightly disappointing night out, we went back to our room to sleep and prepare for our 16 or so hour sleeper bus and boat journey to Koh Phi Phi the next day.

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