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Published: November 29th 2009
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Sawadee kaa. Well, we made it to Bangkok after two and a half month of travelling in India & Nepal. We were promised a cleaner and more pleasant experience than we'd had so far and it wasn't a word of a lie. The city is very metropolitan, clean and easy to get around and the best bit is that streets have names and signposts so its actually possible to navigate without getting lost, which was an unknown concept in India.
We arrived in the evening and caught the airport bus to the touristy area of Kao San road. We made the mistake of staying on the road itself for the first night which was non-stop partying and loud music. Learning from our mistake, we moved a few streets over to a quieter area with some fantastic street food stalls. The rooms are basic but very clean compared to hat we are use to. Strangely, not all have plug sockets so charging the laptop to write blogs has been a challenge.
Opting for some sight seeing, we headed for the Grand Palace on our first day which is an impressive collection of colourful buildings and wats (religious buildings) located within
the palace walls. Anything that looks gold actually is, being coated in a thin gold leaf. This ranged from Buddhas and wall paintings to huge stupas and spires. The buildings all had that distinctive oriental architecture, mixed in with some of the more traditional Buddhist traits that we saw throughout Nepal. The main wat contained the emerald Buddha statue (which is actually jade), sitting high on top of a platform surrounded by worshippers. The whole site was brilliantly decorated and made a great introduction to Thailand. A short stroll down the road took s to Wat Pho in which lies a gigantic statue of Buddha reclining on some cushions, over 10m or so at least! The site also had some smaller wats and hundreds of other Buddha statues (normal sized) lined up along various walls. Impressive.
For our second day, we headed to Dusit Palace Park, which contains an old wooden palace of the king (Rama V), made of teak but put together without nails which was an impressive twist. The site also contained many buildings dedicated to different royal artefacts, such as jewellery, palanquins, murals and thrones, again with distinct thai-ness. One of the favoured methods of decorating
things is to use colourful beetle wings of reds and greens which have a sparkly appearance and are cut into shapes and stuck onto all types of objects from jewellery boxes to wall hangings. After walking there and back (around 10km) we were in need of a good rest!
Museumed out by our third day, we on an express boat down the river to china town and toured around the narrow streets. There were some amazing curiosities on sale from HUGE bags of pork crackling, dried and flattened squids, eels, exotic fruit and a whole range of sea creatures (and their various organs) that we failed to recognise. We then headed to Wat Tramit to view the solid gold Buddha, which stands three meters tall, hidden for years in plaster from plunderers and forgotten until something fell on it, chipping the case away and revealing it as solid gold. We caught the subway to the red light district for a look and it turned out to be relatively tame, except for the sign advertising 'Special Testical Massage, 800baht'. There was a large park nearby filled with exotic trees, small lakes and people practising thai -chee - a welcome break
from the noise of the city. We finished the tour by taking the sky train to Siam Square which is the main trendy shopping area with towering malls, cinemas, restaurants and other great indulgences of the western world. Having not seen anything on this scale in a while, we spent a few hours wandering around and taking it all in, followed by a slow bus ride back through the rush hour traffic to our hotel. There are literally thousands of 7/11s in Bangkok so we stopped in to buy a couple of large bottle of Chang beer (6.4%) and drank that evening while watching the world go by.
On our final day in Bangkok (for now), we caught the bus to the infamous Chatachuk weekend market which is located net to a park towards the edge of town and contains over 10,000 stalls selling clothes, antiques, furniture and jewellery to name a few things. The place is huge and has to be seen in order to appreciate the massive scale. Overall, apart from the drunken tourist sprawl of Kao San Road, we really liked Bangkok and felt much more relaxed in this capital city compared to either Delhi or
Kathmandu, so we look forward to passing back through on our way back from Cambodia in a few months.
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david blewitt
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Absolutely fantastic
Looks a fabulous place. Any oldies touring around, or are they all youngsters? Have you stayed in any youth hoste type places, or are they generally backpackers type hotels? or regular hotels?