Advertisement
Published: January 23rd 2007
Up at 8am AGAIN! We are getting used to this! However, it turned out that we could have slept in due to a sudden downpour that lasted until midday. You can imagine the humidity. Josh, being the photographer that he is, wanted to go onto the roof to take some wet weather photos and movies. That took up about 12 minutes, so we decided to write our first blog entry, which kept us busy til around 12:30 when we set off for the day.
Again we took the Sky Train, but today we stopped at Siam - the closest thing Bangkok has to a centre. The train stopped directly outside the very impressive Paragon Shopping Centre, which lured us inside with its glitz and glamour (not that we looked the part!) Straight to the food court, I was prepared to take the easy way out and get some KFC or Burger King, however Josh insisted we weren’t going round the world to eat the same crap we could get at home. Reluctantly I followed him over to the curry stand. We got delicious but HOT HOT HOT red and green Thai chicken curries for less than AU$2 each. We both
went through our days worth of water just to finish our meals!
In the basement of the shopping centre, we discovered Siam Ocean World. We coughed up 450 Baht each (AU$16.30), but resisted the temptation to upgrade our ticket to include the glass bottom boat ride and 4D movie for an extra 150 Baht. We were soon to learn that something better was about to fall into our lap. We had come accustomed to ignoring the ‘too good to be true’ offers from dodgy Thai sales people, so you can imagine our scepticism when we were offered the opportunity to “…snorkel for free, sir?” by an 18ish year old Thai man without enough English to properly explain his offer. We attempted to interrogate him to find the catch. In the few days we’ve been here, we’ve learnt that there’s always a catch. With too much hesitation and not enough consideration, we thought ‘what the heck?’ We are only going to be here once, so we took a chance…..actually Josh took the chance, and I was the photographer. Honestly, I would have done it, but someone needed to take photos!
We were escorted passed the suckers who had paid
Predators
Josh was happy these fellas seemed to like swimming at the bottom of the tank.for their crappy glass bottom boat ride and taken behind the scenes of the main aquarium. We felt very privileged, but still quite concerned and anxious as we were yet to fully discover what Josh was getting himself in to. After signing away all liability and with complete disregard to the rules of his travel insurance, Josh found out he was going to swim with sharks and stingrays. We couldn’t believe our luck and couldn’t understand why we were given this once in a lifetime opportunity for FREE. We found out later, that they were trailing a new attraction, so effectively Josh was a test dummy.
The photos tell most of the story, so we might leave it at that. Except to say that there were no hidden catches, or charges whatsoever and we are glad we took the chance. It certainly will be one of the highlights of our trip.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.352s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 13; qc: 70; dbt: 0.0882s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
trish
non-member comment
shark photos
Great photos and BLOG. Thanks. Josh -I'm glad that you didn't turn into "the catch" of the too good to be true offer. Take care. love ++++ trish