Nakhon Ratchasima

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We arrived in Korat at 3pm, after being ripped off by taxi who managed to convince me my research was wrong, the bus station wasn’t ten minutes away it was half hour away.. When, in fact, we just ended up paying over the odds. Advice: always try to get a taxi willing to go on meter if you’re not sure how much it should be – they know the city better than you and will always get the better of you when bartering if you’re not local.

3 hours on a bus and we were there – a much shorter journey than we had anticipated. Although on the bus we started to encounter our first communication issues with the conductor lady. Once we were off the bus we called up Hughi, the local guy that had agreed to pick us up from the bus station and take us to the house. When we arrived at the house there did an awkward hello and introduction to Len’s half-sister, both of us know we don’t really speak the other persons language well enough for it to be anything but slightly awkward.

Admittedly, Nakhon Ratchasima isn't much of a tourist attraction and there isn't much to do but as mentioned before this was more of a social visit to see Len's family and take advantage of a couple quiet days rest.

So the next day, we relaxed for a while and had a lie-in which was lovely for a change and then headed into the city for a wander around the mall – much like all the other malls I’ve experienced in Asia. We bought Len’s sister some presents and nephew some ps2 games, ate and then headed back home for the evening. A little while after we arrived home, a confused conversation happened in which we finally understood that Len’s sister was inviting us out for dinner.

She told us it wasn’t far and we would go on motorbikes – me on the back of her bike and Len on the back of her boyfriends. This was my first time on a scooter thing at all, and to say I was nervous would be a massive understatement. I kept reminding myself, this is how she gets around all the time so it’s a good chance to take note of how to ride them sensibly. We arrived in one piece and my fear of the bikes disappeared. We had a lovely dinner. You have a bucket of hot coals on your table and they put the pan thing on top in a similar shape to a large lemon squeezer. It is designed so that you put the soup around the bottom and the meat on the middle pointy bit to cook. It was delicious and a unique way to eat out.

Just as we were enjoying our meal, we were disrupted by a huge gale of wind and the staff hurriedly moving the outdoor tables inside. Sand was blowing in from outside and one of our Thai friends warned me to cover my glasses. As we were nearly at the end of our meal, my immediate thought was that of how are we supposed to ride bikes home in this! We paid the bill and waited for the wind to die down a bit then set off. I wasn’t too nervous until the other Thai girl who ate with us, the only one of 6 people to bring a helmet, insisted that I wore it… although when halfway home, a rock or something hard flew into the helmet making a loud bang, I was extremely thankful that she had. Luckily, all 6 of us arrived home safely, with only one gust of wind pushing us off course.

This morning, we woke up with only one intention which was to head to the local tesco and buy small items with big notes purely because local smaller shops hadn’t enough notes to give us change. When we had eaten breakfast, yet another confused conversation (at first we thought we were going shopping in the city) we finally established we were going somewhere outside the city, it would take 30 minutes to get there for a look around. We pulled up and I could see lots of familiar looking caricatures. For anyone who had watched Karl Pilkington’s An Idiot Abroad 2, these would appear familiar. It is a sort of theme park with huge brightly colours animated statues depicting what will happen to you if you do bad things and then die… their depiction of hell if you like. The gruesome statues show a man having his willy axed in half, a man with the snake up his arse and coming out of his mouth and many other similar scenes. We got blessed by a monk again at the temple there and then rode in the back of the van to tesco for us to change our notes.

It wasn’t until we jumped out of the van there that my lobster red skin began to attract our attention. Therefore, we chose to break our notes by buying aloe vera to help heal me.. Then we went home and relaxed for the rest of the day playing with the cute puppy, Foy, and playing GTA and burnout on the playstation.

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