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Published: July 21st 2006
Wednesday 12th July Paul - If you ever come to Bangkok stay as far away from Khao San Road because it is awful. Magaluf in Asia. It was such a culture shock coming from Cambodia to this and not in a good way. It's full of pretentious idiots who seem to think that they have come to find themselves in Asia. We have heard this conversation on NUMEROUS occasions. As we are waiting for the arrival of Mr Holmes we haven't done an awful lot worth writing about.
We did however arrange to meet up with Anna and Andy and it was really good to see them again. Andy seems about as impressed with Bangkok as I am, I think his comment was "Let's be honest this road is full of dicks". Couldn't agree more. We went to see Pirates 2 at one of the best cinemas I've ever been in and that was that for today!
Laura - Yes we were quite dissapointed on arriving in Bangkok. It isn't really quite what we expected. You would hardly know you were in Asia. Still it is kind of amusing in an ironic way.... And we've invented a new
game to play when walking down Khoa San road. It involves holding hands. One squeeze of the hand for a western tourist who looks ridiculous, and two squeezes for a ladyboy. A great way to point out people without offending anyone! One thing that is starting to grate already, and that is Jack Johnson. All the music stires on KS road seem to play him on repeat. If I hear his stupid voice one more time I may rip my ears off!
Thursday 13th July Paul - A certain Mr Holmes was arriving tomorrow so we wouldn't be getting up to much today as we didn't want to see the sights before him. So after breakfast we decided to go shopping for sunglasses for Laura! Brilliant. My favourite! I couldn't wait to get started!
One hour later and one pair of sunglasses bought we decided to head back to the hotel for a lie down. All that hard work had taken it out of us. Had dinner in a place just down from our hotel before calling it a night.
Friday 14th July Paul - So today was the day Holmsey was
arriving... But we were cut short by an email from Holmsey saying that BA had sold his ticket to someone else!?!?! So he wouldn't be coming until tomorrow now! Tradegy as we would have to spend another night in lovely Khao San road. We did manage to pass the time rather amusingly by getting drunk and laughing at the people passing us by. It was cruel, but it was funny.
Saturday 15th July Paul - Finally Mr Holmes made his appearance. After waiting at the airport for two hours with a sign proclaiming his name, he strolled into view.... without his BAG!! BA had lost his bag! Could this man be anymore unlucky!?!?
Got a cab back to our hotel and decided to have a lazy rest of the day to let Holmesy recover from his jet lag. Chatted about how much we hated British Airways and what possible compensation he would be given... only BA had already given him some compensation... a whole 20 pounds! Don't spend it all at once!
Laura - We were so ridiculously drunk last night that I can't really remember much of it. I do remember us making
friends with a couple of very odd middle aged english men. I hope we don't run into them again. Actually they probably thought we were the strange ones because I doubt our drunken conversation made much sense.
I have no idea how blatant we were at laughing at stupid westerners. I'm keeping my head down from now on in case I get a slap in retaliation! Karma obviously caught up with us in the morning because we felt so ill and could barely get out of bed. In fact we didn't even make it to our own bed, and ended up staying in the empty room we'd booked for Holmsy (to risk confusion, we'll call Paul Holmes in this blog) because it was the nearest one to the hotel entrance! Shameful.
I don't think our hungover faces were a very warm welcome for Holmsy. We saw a minor celebrity in the airport, and apparently she was on the same plane. It was one of the nurses from Holby City (I think her name is Chrissie). I was mildly impressed with our 'star spot' but Paul had no idea who she was. Obviously her BBC wages don't allow her
anything better than economy class.
Sunday 16th July Paul - Finally hit a few of the sights of Bangkok. After catching the river boat ferry down the river we jumped off at the Grand Palace. Even after Angkor Wat it was pretty spectacular although very very busy. Lots of gold shimmering buildings and bizarre animal sculptures.
After a couple of hours of cultural experience we decided that clearly the cinema was the next best option. (Laura - plus we really needed the air con it provides!). We decided not to tell Holmsey about standing for the National Anthem at the start of the film which he found most amusing. At the start of every film a messages comes on the screen to tell you to pay your respects to the king and then everyone stands for the national anthem. Can you imagine that in British cinemas? Brilliant!
Anyway, we saw Superman Returns which was really good. Ate in a rather random restaurant in MBK before heading back to our hotel for cards and beer fun!
Monday 17th July Laura - We started the day with a trip to BA's office to
pick up Holmsy's whopping 20 pound compensation money. Very rude staff. We were not impressed. We had to argue with them to get them to check up on the whereabouts of his bag as they were trying to tell them he had to go to the airport to find out! One simple phone call later and he was informed that his bag would arrive later today. Hurrah! Now we can leave Bangkok. It has grown on me slightly (Paul still hates it), but we've spent more time here than we originally planned so it will be good to move on and see some more of Thailand.
Paul - Had a chat about where we wanted to go next and we decided (rather reluctantly on my part) to head to Chiang Mai to see what all the fuss is about. Laura doesn't want to go trekking to Um Phang anymore so we'll see if that gets off the ground or not. Decided that we'd book a bus for tomorrow night to give Paul more chance to get over his jet lag.
Headed down the river ferry again to visit a huge reclining Buddha. It's about 50m long! It's housed
Rules at Wat Arun
Answers on a postcard on the meaning of rule #4inside this tiny building so it's difficult to get a photo of it's size but it's pretty impressive. We looked around the Wat it was housed and after taking the piss out of a few of the statues (They looked like Mario the plumber, and not in a good way) we headed back to our hotel.
Ate in an Indian Restaurant near our hotel while Holmsey read through his malaria tablet side effects. Random bleeding sounds quite fun! And we're always partial to a bit of double vision!
Tuesday 18th July Paul - Final day in Bangkok and we looked around Wat Arun. Very pretty little Wat, probably the nicest of the 3 we'd seen here. You couldn't climb all the way to the top which was disappointing. Caught the river ferry all the way down to the Sky Train terminal as it sounded like a cool way to travel! Whizzed over Bangkok on the Sky Train to MBK where we ate before getting a taxi back to our hotel to catch our bus to Chiang Mai.
They had a television screen and started to show a movie and Holmsey prayed it wasn't "Transporter
Moo
A woman was selling offerings of flowers, which devotees were placing on the statues. Then she was going round after them and collecting them again! I'm not sure what the religious significance of the offerings is but I'm sure they're not meant to be re-used!! 2" as it was the worst film he'd ever seen. Quite why he'd been to see it was never determined but it wasn't that. It was "Serenity". But the best was yet to come. After that had finished we had another film put on at ONE in the morning. And yes.... it was "Transporter 2"!!! You couldn't make this stuff up!
Laura - The bus was probably the nicest night bus we've been on so far. The air con actually worked (yay!) and we had lots of legroom. It was also not welded together in the middle, which is always a good sign. There were some strange passengers on the bus, however, including some girls who were scared there might be cockroaches on the bus. One of the passengers saw Paul's Saigon T shirt and asked him what Vietnam was like. We told him that it was really good and that we really enjoyed it. To this Mr Strange asked "yeah but, is it just a place for travelling or are there places where you can just chill and enjoy life?". I walked away and left Paul to answer that one.
We managed not to get much sleep
on the bus, what with the terrible films and a bunch of loud Israeli travellers who never shut up. When we finally did get to sleep we were promptly woken up with The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. The time was 5am. This was definitely not a welcome wake up call!
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Craig
non-member comment
I seem to recall the large reclining buddha was actually entering a state of nirvana (nothing to do with grunge Paul, it's a Pali tem literally meaning 'being blown out'), not having a lie down because he was tired. I also racall they had barbers in Thailand, perhaps if you are really bored . . . Oh, if you're amused by the pretentiousness of it all you might want to get hold of a copy of William Sutcliffe's 'Are you Experienced?', it's set in India but the same principles apply and it is funny. Keep imbibing all of that fascinating foreign culture, Superman returns, etc. take care Craig