Sorry it has taken so long for the first update, this has been the quickest month of our lives - and we're still in Thailand!

Weeks 1 & 2 - A tale of two cities...

Bangkok ( Wednesday 29/09 to Saturday 02/10)

Touched down into Bangkok's after a decent flight and straight out into the afternoon rush hour which wasn't as bad as expected. Our pre-booked hotel - the Shanghai Mansion - in Chinatown was fantastic, finished very nicely in c. 1935 Shanghai decor with good service and a good bar! A cheap place when compared to the UK (and cheaper than our dorm rooms in Sydney over Christmas and New Year!) but well beyond our budget for SE Asia so we knew it wasn't to last.

Chinatown appeared to be the busiest area of Bangkok we could have chosen to spend a few days. A quick walk on the first evening found it taking five minutes to walk 50 metres such was the volume of people on the pavements and vehicles on the road (sometimes vice versa!) - not good combination we were used to. Food stalls serving rice, veg and a lot of seafood fought for space to cook their food on the pavements while tables and chairs filled with their customers spilled out onto the road. Struggled to find anything we fancied eating, especially Shel being a veggie! Over the next three days the Shanghai Mansion would become our little oasis as we explored a sticky and bustling Chinatown and Bangkok.

Spent the next couple of days exploring the touristy areas of Bangkok which are well worth a look despite the crowds. The Royal area of the City (Ko Ratanakosin) was particularly impressive; intricately designed ornamental palaces and temples strikingly coloured in red, green, blue and mostly gold. Saw Wat Phra Kaew ('Wat' loosely meaning temple) and the Grand Palace, the latter now only used ceremonially by the King. The day after we headed to Wat Pho, a quieter but similarly impressive series of structures, and over the river to Wat Arun, the Khmer inspired 82 metre high tower. Also headed up to backpacker central, Th. Khao San and Soi Rambutri (Th. = Thanon = Road and a Soi is a smaller road that lead off the Thanons). Plenty of clothes and food stalls, offered the services of many tailors and masseuses! Very different area of Bangkok to Chinatown, full of Europeans for a start!

Sight seeing made us pretty hungry so also spent some time searching out vegetarian eateries (sometimes more successfully that others) and found a good few places including some food stalls which Shel fancied eating at although not in Chinatown!

Bangkok is a fantastic city, you'll struggle to be bored here. It bustles with Thais and tourists from all over, not just Europe. It smells, good and bad, the pollution makes you appreciate cleaner air and the heat means you always enjoy a cold beer no matter what time of day you have it! Bangkok seems to be a place to be seen in small chunks and it was with slight relief that we boarded the sleeper train to Chiang Mai on Saturday evening.