2ns blog update

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Ka wat dèe!

Thought that I would sit and write an update to our travels as we are currently on a sleeper train from Bangkok to Chang Mai, it's 3:30am (haven't quite got my sleep pattern worked out yet) and I didn't want to wake Carol so I moved to the top bunk.

So we arrived in Bangkok at about 2am off of our flight from Dubai on the 19th and we jumped straight into a taxi to get to our first hostel (the buddy boutique) which was quite odd as it had no windows, so felt a bit claustrophobic but it was fine for us to sleep for the night.



We wake up for our first true day in Bangkok and head to the famous Kao San road to haggle ourselves some holiday clothes as we realised that some of our travel wears were not quite suitable haha, we dropped our bags off at the next place that we wanted to sleep and were extremely happy to find that this place had windows!! Even our own little balcony that looked over some bars and restaurants. We then ate our first street food, which tasted amazing but we both knew that our true Asian dining experiences had not even started. We carried on shopping and haggling which I bloody love doing and Carol even started getting comfortable with it by the end of the day.



We both decided that one day in Bangkok was not enough for the both of us and booked another night in the same place. The following day we walked to "The Grand Palace " and it was incredible to see all the intricacies of the temples and the amount of work that went into creating a place of worship like that. We didn't however expect to be told by the local people (at least 6 times ) that it was closed for prayers or for the public, we arnt quite sure why this is but we managed to find our way in anyways.



So sitting back at our hotel we were trying to decide what we would like to do next and both thought that volunteering at the Chaing Mai Elephant sanctuary would be awesome so we went to the travel store to see if we could book tickets for the sleeper train to travel to northern Thailand, this we found out we could not do as the tickets were sold out but this led us to booking the Stray tour 😊 this could not have worked out better for us, as we are both quite unorganised. This tour offers us travel and takes us to places off of the trail in safe company and shown around by experienced guides. The night before we were due to go we were a bit dubious about booking because we kind of thought it was cheating to do it ourselves.



How wrong we were 😊



We are only one day into the tour and can already tell we made an amazing choice here. We are travelling with five other girls that are all English (bar 1 American) and our guide is a kiwi man named Josh or Friendly (his stray name). We took a boat tour around some amazing temples and sat and had a great bonding session with drinks and food before boarding this sleeper train that I am hoping to sleep on soon haha I can always sleep by the pool tomorrow.

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