The Tuk Tuk Experience!

Hello all Steve here for our second blog update. Sorry for the time it has taken to update this we have really neglected the blog.. To be honest we have been having an insanely eye opening experience to worry about blogging! But we have been keeping notes to remind us of the crazy time!

So here goes.. Day 2 or 3 of Thyland.. (Thailand) - To be honest the days are all merging together. We decided to take a walk down south of Bangkok to the Grand Palace.. Which we walked past and kept going and going.. Sweating the whole way in the crazy humid heat! - Which later we found out it was 400Baht each to get in! (£9 to get in compared to 80Pence to get into others) So we headed to a place call Wat Po which was literally 5 minutes further down the street. The place was amazing and so grand. Buildings covered in gold, glittering sparkles and filled with Monks. We walked around and see more Buddha for a life time!- We watched the Monks sing, then made our way to another building which had pictures of the King and Buddha, we soon learnt that they worship both as pretty much equals.. Strange for a English person to get their head round as I would never pray to the Queen.... We was approached by a very nice Thai man. He explained how to pray to Buddha with flowers, candles and the Joss sticks. Then we put a piece of Gold leaf on a statue of god knows who.. Maybe the King. Rama..

The man then started talking some more about a great Monk he knows who will bless us. Being Naive Englishman we went along with it we followed him as he talked about the temple, soon taking us out of the walls of the temple into a place looking very much like Thai barracks. These we soon found out were where the monks actually lived. He banged on a door of a house, some guy inside shouted really loud in Thai, it turned out to be a Monk who this man wanted to bless us. There was stray dogs everywhere and some young Monks laughing at the scared look on our faces as we were trying to be ushered into this old monks house.. We politely said no and hastily "ran" away.. The look on Kirstys face was such a picture as the dogs walked a little closer in this strange place.

We soon left the temple and came across a man who told us the Grand Palace was closed when we wanted to go in.. We got into a Tuk Tuk which cost a whopping 40Baht.. He had a little chat with the driver and this 5 minutes drive took an amazing 2 hours.. We got took to Jewellery shops, suit shops.. More jewellery shops and a Tourist Information TAT shop. Which we found out by a nice Thai guys they got paid a further 300Baht for taking us to.. Each!! - Little s***s.. To think we gave him 100Baht for taking us to a couple of nice temples.. It really is true to say once you have seen one temple you have seen them all.. Cheers Dean. J

When we finally got back to the hotel we went for a nice long swim, ate and slept! - Note to travellers! Be wary of Tuk Tuk drivers!