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Published: November 25th 2006
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Bangkok streets
Street vendors and beautiful chaos Penang > Bangkok today. Taxi from the Bangkok Airport had no clue where our hotel was, but he was nice enough to call on his mobile and track things down. Note to travelers: always have a printout of your hotel name, address and phone number easy to grab when you are in a cab.
Staying at the lebua at State Tower. Good location close to shopping, dining, river and sky train. Went out exploring in the afternoon and evening. Bangkok streets make me feel like I'm stuck in a William Gibson novel at times. There is a chaos and vitality that we have not encountered in our other stops to date. We ate some delicious street vendor grub (which we think was chicken) that was cheap cheap. Fed us both for under a US $1. Like KL, the bootleg scene is out of control here but it's a little more spread out and manageable. After talking to a street vendor, we were ushered through a closed antique store, up a set of stairs and after a secret knock into a back room where there was quite a thriving DVD business going. This time we stocked up and are now sitting
on eight more first run movies, that we scored for under a buck each thanks to Steph's good negotiation skills. Said it before, but movie night at our house when we get back. Please let us know if you have any requests (they were current to Happy Feet last night) and we'll see what we can do.
Plans for our days here include a bike trek through the jungle, cooking class at a Thai restaurant and general exploration. Stay tuned to this post for updates.
Tour De Bangkok We had settled on a bike ride through the Bangkok jungle yesterday - actually the island of Bang Kra Jao. This "easy" bike trip was described on the net as
"We ride about 25 kilometers in total. The ride starts on Sukhumvit Road and there is a short section in the city before we cross the river. We then ride along very minor roads, pathways, through alleys, temples, gardens and tropical jungle. There are no hills. Some of the canal paths are elevated and quite narrow and we advise caution on these sections but otherwise it is a nice easy ride."
This could not have been
further from the truth. Steph described it last night as "The only way I could have been prepared for that is if I trained on a two foot sidewalk over our pool doing nothing but doing 90 degree turns for a month." It didn't help that they had her on a man's bike a frame size too big either. Needless to say we are both a bit sore today.
The bike ride took us through the city streets, across the river on a long boat on through the jungle on these very very narrow paths. The paths had been built on top of an old canal system. The five hour tour passed us by temples, homes, villages, markets. The Thai people are so friendly. They were so quick to offer samples of their fruits, nuts, etc. that they were harvesting along the paths when we passed by and the children were so excited to see us come by, all shouting "hello!" as we passed.
All in all, a very interesting experience but not sure how quick we'd be to do it again.
I'm on top of the world Ma! (part 2) One of the perks
of the lebua hotel package was dinner at Sirocco, their restaurant at the top (63rd floor) of the hotel. Awesome meal served open air on top of Bangkok with the lights of the town all around. See the band setup for an idea of the view. Highly recommended for anyone with some time in town that wants to impress a date. Reservations were hard even as a hotel guest, so book early.
Temples of Doom Visited the Wat Po temple and the King of Thailand's Grand Palace today. Wat Po features a 150-foot long statue of a reclining Buddha. Massive. The entire temple complex is amazing with statues, pagodas, and buildings covering a huge area.
The Grand Palace was a massive site as well, and while it no longer houses the King, it sure does house a lot of tourists. Proper attire is required to enter to show respect. We had fun sitting at a cafe just outside the gate and watching tourists (mostly Germans it seemed) getting yelled at by guards for wearing shorts and tank tops despite the fact that there had been at least three sets of signs and personnel advising everyone at the
Dog!
Stray dogs everywhere in Bangkok! They all seem happy, very well fed and are smart enough to stay out of the roads. outer gates. Some people!
It's easier to order it off a menu Today was a cooking class at The Blue Elephant restaurant where we learned to prepare four common Thai dishes (green papaya salad, green curry with chicken, pad thai and tom yam soup) The instruction was great and even I was able to create a tasty meal. It helped that most of the prep work was done for us and the ingredients were all right at hand. Don't expect us to be cooking for you at home anytime soon, but we'll be looking for the ingredients when we hit the farmer's markets back in ATL.
King Day Monday (every Monday?) celebrates the King here, with everyone busting out yellow polo shirts with the royal emblem to show their support. I would guess 60%!o(MISSING)f the Bangkok population was wearing yellow today. I wonder what it would take to organize the population at home for a show of nationalism like that.
PS - We're on Pigeon Alert from here out as the Bird Flu striking Seoul is big news here. Off to Bali in the morning, not sure what the Internet situation will be
Canal Market
Hard to see, but they were cooking in the boats. so stay tuned...
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Great job with the blog
Just caught up on your entire blog, and i feel ashamed for not having a good blog going. I guess working the first half of my trip and camping the 2nd half make it a little harder. Also, great photos you've gotten up with each post. The bane of having a professional DSLR is that after 2.5 weeks in Australia I've ended up with 2000+ photos in raw format. With an older, slower laptop, getting that down to a few quick pics to go online is going to be difficult before I get home and put in some time. Who knows, maybe you two will have your Blog, Dad will have his powerpoints, and I'll start printing books of my journeys.