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Bangkok: Backpackers, Backcrackers, Buckets and Buddas!
Hi everyone! Having a great time, wish you were here, bla bla bla.
Haven't been mugged or murdered yet, though it is bloody muggy which makes me a little murderous! I'm in Chiang Mai now though, which is up north and a bit cooler, though still really humid. It's nice and quiet too after the hustle and bustle of Bangkok.
So I landed in Bangkok around midnight on Tuesday the 10th of June. As my backpack came around on the carousel, I noticed that the zips on the bottom half of my bag were a little bit open and had a bit of a Shappelle Corby moment (started imagining myself with a shaved head and A Current Affair reporter in front of me)! It's all good, it was only open an inch, just because I'd overpacked, but now I know to start threading the padlock through the bottom hole in the zip tags!
The New World Hotel wasn't bad - I was enjoying having my own room to myself and sleeping in for a couple of days. I met a couple of groovy Glaswegians in the lobby who were looking at the same tour noticeboard as me, so I ended up spending the day with them. First we checked out the National Museum. Interesting, but all the different kings start to blend together after a while. They love their royals here though! But not in a chased-by-the-paparazzi-for-Prince-William-gossip kind of way - think giant posters of the king on the sides of buildings, and pictures of the royal family in people's shops...
After the museum and lunch in a place full of other whities, we checked out the market stalls on Khao San Road - this is the main tourist drag where you buy your pirated DVDs and top quality Billabong boardshorts for about $2 (I'm spewing I paid $70 for a pair of real ones two days before I left!). Managed to restrain myself from buying anything, since I dont' really want to be lugging these things around for the next two months! We then went for a Thai massage - seemed like a great idea, nice and relaxing to get me into the holiday mode... no. Think physio/chiro/medieval torture. Ok, maybe not that bad, but relaxing's definitely not the word I'd use! All I could think was "are they qualified to be digging their thumbs into my vertebrae like that...?" Then being picked up and twisted until you hear your hip joints crack can't be healthy either... interesting, and now I can say I've done it!
That night I went off to meet my tour group - turns out it wasn't my tour group, and my group meeting wasn't until the next night! Nice - see what happens when you have no internet in the week leading up to your holiday? So instead the night was spent checking out the night markets, and eating hawker food - Joe the hawker man is my new best friend - cheap food and free beer if I came back!
The next day I pretty much just bummed around - slept in, posted some stuff home (yep, offloading already) attempted to update this blog (except for the internet cutting out right as I was finishing - twice!), checked out the shops, went wandering. That night I met my actual tour group - there were still a couple more to come though. There were three Americans, two poms, and a kiwi, plus our group leader Pun Pun. After the pleasantries, itineraries, getting-to-know-you stuff, we went out for dinner - Pun Pun took us to... Joe the hawker man! How convenient! Then went out with Alex (the kiwi) and his friend Tom the Pom for what ended up being a pretty massive night. Once I find a computer where I can upload photos, you'll see the evidence of cocktails in buckets (yes, literally - actual buckets) and the random pommy backpackers that become your best friend when you walk past a bucket stand! After losing Alex and Tom in a pub called Gullivers (which shuffled us straight upstairs - turned out downstairs was full of Thai women and dirty old white men), and finding another Aussie named Emily, we wandered back past the bucket stands and found ourselves playing drinking games with a bunch of pommy backpackers for the rest of the night! I'd arranged to meet Alex and my roommate Sam for breakfast at 7am, so without actually getting any sleep yet, I wandered in to the hotel restaurant to find out she'd just about had a heart attack when I didn't come home, and woke up our tour leader to tell him I'd been kidnapped by white slave traders! Oops...
Anyway, I think I was forgiven, so after a quick shower and breakfast (and still no sleep - amazing what the Thai Red Bulls can do!) the three of us walked down to the pier and jumped on one of the long boats for a cruise through the canals. It was pretty amazing to see the way people are living - ramshackle wooden houses on stilts, gaps in the walls, dirt and mud - and yet they have these immaculate, ornate little spirit houses built outside - the houses they build for the spirits to live in (to keep them out of their own houses) are fancier than their own! We also stopped by a jetty to buy some bread to feed the fish - these huge catfish type things live in the river ("It was this big!"), and swarm around the boat waiting to be fed by hand. After the longboat ride, we were back to the hotel to meet Pun Pun and the rest of the group (plus a new recruit - Aussie named Sarah) to do the ABT ("Another Bloody Temple") tour. I've completely forgotten the names of most of them - it was stinking hot and they start to blend together after a while! There was the Golden Mount, the Grand Palace, and another one close to our hotel, the name of which I'll look up later. They're all so ornate though, and such a contrast to a lot of the poverty we're seeing around here. I'll get some photos up soon, there's not much point trying to describe them.
So, after a very long, sweaty day of walking, looking at temples and searching for food, we made it back to the hotel with just enough time to have a wet-wipe shower in their toilets (we'd already checked out by this stage) and change shirts before we headed to the train station for the overnight train to Chiang Mai. Running out of internet time, and this keyboard keeps sticking and it's driving me mad, so more details later!
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