Our First Venture Into The City

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Well. it wasn't the best night sleep both of us has ever had but think it was due to the excitement and anticipation of finally being here.
A guy called Ville who worked in Santorini with me this summer is working in Bangkok for My Travel Finland (lucky beggar) so I managed to get in touch with him and we arrange to meet for lunch today on the famous Khosan Road - will be nice to get some info from someone who lives here.

But our first task is to discover how to get into the centre (as our Guesthouse is a little way out). We ask at reception who are very friendly and we are told that we cn either get a taxi straight there or make use of the public transport and take the skytrain into the centre and then a riverboat up to the area (Bangkok is MASSIVE!). Having a love for public transport and adventure, we take the latter option.

The skytrain is only 10 mins walk and is like the subway but above ground - and cleaner!

The riverboat however is something completley different - you stand on a pier until the public long boat comes along and a guy on a whistle at the back of the boat directs the driver to dock up (reminded me of a sheepdog!). Then it's jump on as quick as you can and away you go - they don't hang about! But you can see some of the temples and even river houses along the way - we loved it! Plus the boats even had special standing places for the monks - it's so good to be somewhere with different culture.

We manage to navigate our way to Kho San and have a walk around before we have to meet Ville.

The first thing that struck me is how busy Thailand is, with traffic and people rushing everywhere.
The second is the street stalls selling everything, from fake ID's and driving licenses (right on the street behind the police station - i kid you not) to food, drinks, clothes, Cd's, bags, braiding and at night even women!

We met Ville and had a proper Thai lunch, was great to catch up with him. As he was based in Bangkok and had only been to the islands on little trips he couldn't tell us much about Northern Thailand. He did however tell us about a great weekend market held in Bangkok that has over 8000 stalls - we've saving that until the end!

After a drink we headed back to our Guesthouse (getting slightly lost from the Skytrain on the way) and realised that we had better read up abit more on Thailand as we hadn't really studied it as much.

Di had her Lonely Planet and our accom had a book library with quite a few guidebooks, so I 'borrowed' one to take to our room to do some planning.

However our good intentions did not pan out as we hoped and by 9.30am we had both fell asleep reading on the bed, whoopsies!

Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

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Photos

The river boat
Hop on quick everybody!