Bangkok Bustle

---

Bangkok is a huge city with high rises for suburbs on end. We stayed in the Classic Palace, which was about 2kms from the city centre and about an hour from the airport.

Bangkok is the capital city and central business district – it is also one of the major hubs of Asia. Tuk Tuk drivers work on commission here and take you indirect routes to your destination – to places like suit tailors or jewellery stores where they try to sell you their products. Unfortunately the traffic is ridiculously bad in Bangkok and getting taxi is not worth it – thankfully, we discovered at the end that Bangkok has an excellent public transport network and the train station was near the hotel.

We did a few tours of Bangkok – the temple tour is a must for any tourist in the city – Thailand has thousands of temples – the Grand Palace being the most famous. My favourite was the one that housed the reclining budda. Our guide, Helen took us to a legitimate jewellery-making store before dropping us back at the hotel. We learned that the king is so revered in Thailand that it is illegal to say a bad word about him.

The night markets we went to were bigger than those in Chiang Mai but had the same sort of stuff. We went to the same restaurant two nights in a row and both nights forgot to pay for the beer.

One the last day we did a tour of the floating markets – these are traditional fruit and veg markets an hour and a half from Bangkok where the locals barter and sell with each other – it is all on the water in a river and must make some tourist revenue. Its worth mentioning that this tour takes you to a snake charmer or something similar on the way where you can put a snake around your neck.

Thailand is the kind of country which wets your appetite for travel – a place many tourists come back to again and again. I highly recommend going and saying Sawdawsee, bartering at the markets and having a Singha or two at the end of a hot day.

---