One bloody long day in Bangkok

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The day started when we were woken by our alarm at 4.30am the 2nd of July after only 3 hours sleep, we had watched the England v Portugal football match the night before and in our eagerness to spend as much time on the beach as we could, when we were booking our flights back to Bangkok we had booked the last possibly flght out of Samui. This just happened to be the first flight of the day and meant we arrived in Bangkok at about 7am (extremely tired), with our flight out of Thailand not being until 3am the 3rd of July and meaning we had about 20 hours to kill in Bangkok.

We started by going to What Pho the temple that houses the massive lying buddha where we spent about an hour walking round the grounds before waving down a tuk-tuk and making our way to Khao Sanh Road, in a bid to do some last minute shopping. However on arrival we discovered we were far too early even for all the stall holders so didn't get much shopping done. We decided to have some breakfeast and see if any stalls opened but in the end we gave up and jumped in a cab and head out to MBK. MBK is the biggest shopping mall I have ever seen, it is about 7 storeys high and about as long as Northlands mall end to end (and sells mainly rip offs). There are also two other malls on the opposite street corners (selling genuine goods for 5 x the price) which are almost as big and they are building a fourth on the other corner. So if you every need anything this is the place to come because if you can't find it here is doesn't exist. We spent the majority of our day wandering around here and spent more money than we expected, but I guess that's what happens when you spend about 10 hours straight in one mall!

At 8pm we cabbed out to the airport and had some dinner. We had our first fast food of the whole 2 month trip, Burger King and it made us both feel awful. We finally checked in at about midnight and made our way to the gate, only to find out that our plane had been delayed by an hour (the last thing we need after being up for almost 24 hours). We did however manage to find some chairs to sprawl accross and grab a quick nap. At 4am the 3rd of july we boarded our plane to Dubai and the flight was pretty good. When we landed though we had to rush through the airport to make it to our connection flight and meet up with Mike and Pange as they were on our flight to London. We finally arrived about 42 hours after our day had begun in Ko Samui. We were completely shattered but managed to stay awake catching up with Joe and Mandy to a reasonable hour and allowing our body clocks to adjust to London time. One hell of a day.

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