Advertisement
Published: July 26th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Royal Palace - bangkok
A bunch of Stupas and one suspisciously Chinese looking fulla Finally we arrive in Thailand!
To be honest, we really had no idea what to expect here. We know its one of the most touristed places around here and we were really bracing for the worst ... however, we have been pleasantly suprised.
The initial bus trip didn't really help with the pleasant surpisedness though (its a word .. honest). To be fair, it was a Cambodian company promising a fairly simple thing - one bus from Siem Reap to the border and one more bus from the border to Bangkok. Easy. If only. First up, the minivan to pick us up was half an hour late. No biggie, and that is usually the case - just a little sleep lost. Next step was cramming one more person and 4 more bags than a minvan should really hold. That's cool, its only 10 minutes to the office. Falling out on the street we see an unruly mob forming. Right, the big bus is late, that's cool. Nope. Big bus isn't coming! Instead, for only a small extra fee (about NZ$4) each, we can take a taxi to the border - the bus apparently didn't come back from the border
Hippo!
Most dangerous animal in Africa ... and you can touch it - awesome! (that orange blur is a carrot) last night. Put into perspective - the actual bus tickets were about NZ$12 so $4 is a fair whack but we took it on the chin and continued. The plus side was the drive over horrific roads (even by our now fairly low standards) was about an hour shorter than by bus - cool.
The border was chaos itself - a busy town, plus muddy, rut-strewn roads, casinos galore and confused looking tourists littering the streets. However, getting through was fairly straightforward, nobody offering to 'take our passports' for a fee and a very ordered set of lines leading up to windows. We then were led by our friendly tour guide through to the Thai side of the border and again, proceeded through very easily. Next up the tour guide said we needed to wait for the rest of the group to come through. Uh oh. See, some people had taken great issue with an extra $3 and we knew they weren't coming through in the taxis like the guides thought they were. Problem being, the tour guides wanted a full bus. Ok then, we'll tough it out. 3 hours later, the bus is apparently full and we transfer
Macau on a Trapeze
After this, the bird did maths, rode a bike and raced another bird ... I know it sounds like animal cruelty but for some reason, it seemed ok. to another office to switch to another, larger bus. hmmmm. Problem is, that bus turned up at oh, 8 o'clock at night! To clarify, we jumped on the bus at 7am and were supposed to arrive in Bangkok at about 6pm. At the end of the day, we turned up a little after midnight after being told each hour on the hour that the bus was '5 mins away'. The joke got a little thin and most of the bus turned to the local rum to make things a little cheery - making for an interesting bus ride for one particular passenger (not one of us, before you accuse too quickly) and none too chipper for his girlfriend either, who ended up seatless for a 4 hour bus leg.
Regardless, us and another canadian couple searched out a little hole in the wall hotel and settled in. On awaking, we searched out the tourist mecca in Bangkok - Khao San road. We thought we had seen tourist streets before but this is entirely another level. It kinda made me think of Las Vegas (or at least the one I've seen on tv) except with more street life and cheaper
food. But heck, it was actually kind of cool, if darned expensive for Thailand. One top notch laugh was seeing a pirated copy of our friend Mike's threadless t-shirt design prominently displayed on a couple of racks - random. (http://www.threadless.com/product/1017/Justified_And_Amplified if you are interested in buying the real thing!).
But yes, Bangkok is definitely one of our favourite big cities so far - pretty clean, heaps to do, good eats and multitudes of cheap clothing (of which we will avail ourselves when we buy entirely new wardrobes before heading to Dublin). However, we will visit Bangkok in anger at the end of our trip so for this brief trip we really saw: Khao San Road, The Royal Palace (the King is pretty important here), Bangkok's biggest outdoor market (closed, alas), and possibly the world's most enormous mall - again, we were happy to see the cheapness and variety on offer.
After two days of getting our bearings, we jumped on a sleeper train to Chiang Mai - about 12 hours north. This region of Thailand is jungle central. It is the rainy season so everything is wet and green and the bugs bigger and badder (we were somewhat
Jaguar went Jaguar
Despite what it looks like, I didn't tease the Jaguar but I do think it fancied the large bit of steak holding the small bit! dismayed to learn there are over 200 species of mosquitos here!). Chiang Mai is pretty firmly on the tourist trail so there are plenty of banana pancakes, not too mention tuk tuk drivers more than happy to take your baht off you 😊. It a cool little town with old city walls that are falling away in some places and replaced by a moat in others. You can kind of take your pick with activities here - rock climbing, rafting, mountain biking, trekking, bungy jumping, zoos, elephant camps and safaris. Yup, safaris.
But first up, the zoo had a panda and hence went from 'that might be nice' to 'compulsary viewing' in an instant. Turns out its on a par with, if not better than, Auckland's zoo. Realistic enclosures, happy, healthy looking animals, a monorail (admittedly a lame monorail but any monorail is a good monorail, right?) and a number of cool shows. We saw a macau take a flying fox across a stage, hippos basically eating out of our hand, seals jumping through hoops and, most importantly of all, the chance to feed raw meat to Jaguars - excellent!
Pretty cool all round really - being that close
Awww
So much for a mother's love - the mum kept stealing the baby's food! to a hippo (it could have eaten my face if it wanted) and the big cats was incredible and not really to be topped. Until ....
Elephant park! This place is a centre for injured and rescued elephants from all round Thailand and Asia. There is probably something like 50 elephants here and you walk around and can touch them, feed them and ride them if you so desire! Ultra cool. For the truly dedicated, you can do a 3 day course teaching you to be a Mahout or elephant trainer. You basically get the elephant as a pet for 3 days - unbelievable. Alas, at this point, funds are a little low and the course is outrageously expensive so we settled for feeding bananas to the baby elephant (and being sniffed at close quarters by its 7 foot tall mother - eeek!). Definitely a cool place, and made all the better by the fact that to get there is a small adventure (unless you pay the ridiculous tourist bus rates) .. it was kind of nice to have to revert to sign language and be the only white people on a bus again!
To top off the
One of the best
What you don't see is the crowd of people the elephant was blowing the water at .. they laughed until they got wet animal triumverate we also visited the animal safari. Basically, its kind of like Jurassic park (eerily so in that you only go there at night!) but with your standard safari fare - lions, tigers, zebras, giraffes and pretty much any deer and large cat species you can shake a stick at. Some of the animals (ie. the ones that won't eat you) roam free and come right up to the sides of the car you drive through on - being 1m away from a zebra is actually pretty damn cool. Highlight of the commentary was the Obex "body like a horse, face like a zebra". Guess you had to be there but believe me, it was hi-lar-ious.
So, there we are - more animals than you can shake a sugar cane branch at. Tomorrow, we head even further north to go jungle trekking (sounds hardcore but hopefully its actually just a nice way to see some villages), ride some elephants, white water rafting and a host of other activities. Then its back to Chiang Mai for some mountain biking before we head south to the islands for some R&R after all this activity!
We'll keep you posted after the trekking - drop us an email, be great to hear from you.
Sharps out.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.089s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 6; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0567s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Anna Cushen
non-member comment
awwwwwwwww
awwwwwwwwwwww i wanna feed the elephant toooooo!!!!! you guys sound like you are having an amazing time. love getting to read your blog and catch up on what you are up to. i play a little guessing game with myself - it's called "who wrote that bit... kelly or andrew?" i must admit that sometimes i think i lose this game miserably.. anywhooooooo take care, stay safe on that junge trek of yours! miss you both, love ya's heaps. xoxoxox Anna.