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Our last day in Bangkok…for now! We've had some great times over the last few days and it's been a definite improvement on KL. Yet we'll still be glad to get out of the heat, humidity, noise and craziness for the next few days.
In the morning we decided to walk to Chinatown after collecting our tickets and dropping our bags off with the travel agent ready for the bus tonight. They guy who works there and is always hanging around by the door to show people in warned us that nowhere in Chinatown would be open yet, but we decided to go and see for ourselves…turns out he was right! The food stalls and market just weren't there and we got very hot and frustrated with no real idea of where we were going. Then a tuk-tuk driver came out of a Chinese restaurant and tried to talk us into getting his tuk-tuk. He seemed to think I was German based on the wristband I was wearing (don't know how he worked that one out!) and proceeded to shout 'Heil Hitler!' at me a few times, as if we were back in 1940! Time to get out of Chinatown…
Next stop in a taxi was a shopping mall that had been recommended to us called MBK. We likd the sound of the 'International Food Court' on the 5th floor and headed straight there. Just before we went in we were stopped by a guy offering 'Thai Buffett…all you can eat …79 Baht (£1.80)'. That sounded good to us so we followed him inside…big mistake! The place was pretty busy and everyone seemed to be enjoying the food, but when we went up to the buffet table all we found were pots of different soups and sauces, noodles and assorted spices and veg - no meat! Also, we didn't really know what any of the sauces were or what to serve them with so we just had to do a bit of lucky dip, which didn't turn out too well! After a couple of attempts with platefuls of noodles and sauce that didn't taste quite right, we decided to give up and settle the bill. We were probably a source of great amusement to the Thai staff as we were absolutely clueless…didn't satisfy our hunger though! We decided to actually get ourselves inside the food court this time, and were relieved to find an incredible range of foods (that we recognised!) with the option to choose whatever you liked from any stand using a swipe card and pay for it at the end. We all went for completely different things, including a club sandwich, Vietnamese style pork and Greek dips, olives and feta cheese.
After lunch, we still had a couple of hours to kill, so we wandered around the indoor market stalls and picked up a few more things. We caught a taxi, after waiting in a massive queue and ended up back at the travel agents. They transferred us to our bus by taxi and we were dropped off outside somewhere called 'Indra Tours' - again, we had no idea where we were!
Then the fun began - as usual, our bus trip proved to be quite eventful! Outside Indra Tours, we met our ladyboy host/ess for the trip, whose efforts to be a lady were quite poor - a bad wig and a suit that made her look like the David Walliams and Matt Lucas version fo the ladyboy from Little Britain - we christened her Ting Tong! She took our tickets and pulled out three plastic chairs from a huge pile, before directing us to the gutter in front of the travel office to wait until our bus left! We checked iside and the office was packed, so we had little choice but to use our plastic gutter seats. We made the best of it thought - Laura went over the road to McDonald's for cheeseburgers and Chris and I enjoyed a cold Singha beer from the fridge outside the office! We watched the hostess take tickets from other people arriving and marvelled at how poor her ladyboy efforts were!
When it got to our departure time, Ting Tong announced that 'Bus here. Round corner. Go, go go!'. She led us with our bags to our bus and we left our bags with the woman loading them outside, hoping that they'd make it to Chaing Mai. We were shown to our seats (not a lot of leg room but we've had worse) and were served with a black bean bun and a yakult drink just after we set off! This was followed by a Pepsi - a strange choice when we all wanted to sleep but we drank it anyway! Our host/ess had now changed out of her trousers and into a very short skirt! We managed to get some shut eye until about 1am, when we were awoken at our food stop. None of us were hungry but we got off anyway. Our instructions from our hostess were that we could either get a plate of free food or a free drink, but not both! We took one look at the food, which had already been plated up and had probably been sitting there for hours and decided to get a drink instead!
Back on board, we travelled through the night, sleeping on and off, until we arrived in Chaing Mai at about 6:30am. We were awoken by another host with coffee and a face wipe - nice touch! Time to head into Chaing Mai, courtesy of our free tuk-tuk transfer…
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