Bangkok

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First of these blogs I've ever done, lets see how it goes...

I've been travelling for 1 week now, and haven't even left Bangkok yet so it all still feels like a bit of a holiday. In that week though I have already managed to see and do some incredible things. But I won't lie, many stupid things as well.

The first idiotic thing I managed to do was lose my wallet, containing 2 of my 3 bank cards and about 20 quids worth of baht. I told my parents the simple lie of it falling out of my pocket on the way to my hostel from the airport, the truth is I actually got horrendously drunk on my first night out in Bangkok (Khao San Rd.) with the 2 Aussies and 2 Americans in my dorm which resulted in me jumping in a bush which is what caused me to lose the damn wallet (I'm assuming). Safe to say when woke up in the morning I felt incredibly stupid and embarrassed, but felt lucky to still have my passport, driving licence and 1 bank card. Luckily the Aussies and Americans thought I was hilarious and not embarrassing. Sorry mum and dad.

We (Ollie, Dan, Ryan and me) did also stupidly fall for one of the classic tuk-tuk scams, proving that even 4 university students are still as dumb as hell in any other country. We were heading off to the Vietnam embassy when we were stopped by a very kind and helpful Thai man, he gave us some advice and told us to go to a 'travel information centre' instead because it would be far cheaper and quicker. He hailed us a tuk-tuk and it took us away to the 'tourist information centre' (tuk-tuks are scary as hell when you first get in one, especially in the chaos of Bangkok), we ditched the 'tourist centre' so the tuk-tuk took us to a boat on the river. It was far too expensive, asking for 600 baht at first but haggled down to about 400 each, still a rip off so we decided against it and just to get a taxi to The Grand Palace. Here we were tricked again by being told by a smartly dressed man whom we assumed was working for the Palace that we had to wait a few hours for the next entry slot so should go get a tuk-tuk and do some shopping. We thought why not so jumped in, and preceeded to take us to the Golden Mountain which housed a huge standing buddha. The guy then offered to take us to a 'travel information centre', here we thought we could just make a plan of places to see in Thailand but instead got ripped off and made to look very stupid later. The woman who served us was very kind, polite and helpful and created a schedule of places to stay, things to see etc. She gave us a price of about 12,000 baht for 11 days of travelling, this sounded pretty decent because it's about 250 quid and thats about half our budget for that period so an absolute bargain. We agreed and put down a 1000 baht and 80 dollar deposit. Leaving the shop we were dragged around the known scams of the jewellery and suit shops, this immediately got our alarm bells ringing thinking maybe the trip we had booked was a scam, and they would just take our money and go. We later realised it was the opposite, it was insanely expensive, about 4x the cost compared to if we organise it all ourselves so decided to just cut our losses with the deposit and do it ourselves.



The Grand Palace itself was incredible, the architecture was beautiful and I've never seen so much gold in my life. Yesterday we went to Thailands ancient capital called Ayutthaya, an hour and a half outside of Bangkok. The place is really only the remnants of what it once was, but I think the fact it was all ruins even more interesting and way more appealing to us simple tourists. We hired some bikes for 80p, no helmets though as Thailand seems to have a strict anti-health and safety view of everything. The bikes were crap, but we could go where ever we liked, maneuvering through the traffic and finding our own way to the temples and ruins. We decided to be daring and go to a small restaurant/cafe thing by the side of the road and were blown away by the prices. In Bangkok we had been spending about 250 baht a meal (5 quid) in this cafe we managed to have a meal and a drink for 45 baht, not even a quid, maybe 90p. I have so much time for this. And the food itself; rice, chicken, garlic and veg was actually very tasty...and I'm not shitting myself today so I'm assuming it was safe to eat. Last night we decided to make it a big one, as we won't really be able to do much when we are travelling around Asia, so headed back to the standard Khao San Road. We ended up drinking multiple pints of 'Cheers' and buying buckets of whiskey and red bull which apparently contained an entire bottle of whisky, Dan had a bad one so ended up going home earlier than us but me and Ollie managed to stay there until 6am chatting to some attractive Dutch girls who were trying to teach us some Dutch. 'Ik bin booten hal', which we were told meant 'how are you', turns out it just means 'I am horny'. Damn Dutch girls. We did tell them that 'neeb' means good and have long conversations about Dennis Bergkamp, Van Der Vaart and Van Persie, so probably about evens up. After all this we got back at about 7am, so safe to say I'm not feeling particularly fresh today.

That will probably do for now, I've written everything down I can think of about my travelling so far (that's acceptable). Tomorrow we are travelling up to Sukothai to look around the ruins and temples there which should be awesome. Hopefully I will survive, and keep my dignity, but travelling with Ollie, Dan and Ryan anything could happen.

TC

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