Temple Fever

Our second tuk-tuk experience was classic by-the-book (literally, Lonely Planet told us this might happen). We looked lost. A local man on the street stopped us to see if we needed help. He established a link with us--'i'm a teacher too!' We fell for it. then: 'The temple is closed for the next three hours but you can get a tuk tuk for cheap to the other temples in the city that are open. For you, make sure it only costs 60 baht. That's the local price.'

Crap. locals don't take tuk-tuks.

We ended up in an Indian Suit factory which, Jay, our Thai driver from Chiang Mai ('Ah very nice city!') forced us into, in one of those smiling, obliging sort of ways akin to mentally unstable people about to stab you in the eyeball with a fork. To be fair, it was mercifully brief and he did take us to the suit factory en-route of four of the city's hundreds of temples.

The whistle stop tour:
Wat Traimat (also known as, get this, The Golden Buddha)
this delightful deity weighs in at a delicious 5.5 tonnes of solid gold...
now that's some expensive footwear




The more minor Wats



Our tour ended when Jon guiltily gave Jay a 40 baht tip because overall, at 100 baht, our little three-hour tour hardly broke the bank. We arrived on the side steps of The Grand Palace and Wat Pho (insert joke here) where a pair of smartly dressed, crafty Thai men were trying to convince us of a similar swindle.

Wizened with age, we opted out and instead paid our admission fees at another gate. Inside it was a disneyland made of solid gold. Minus the rides. and the sticky food. and the mouse ears.





but no temple is complete without at least two ridiculous signs:

Thailand's my kind of country.

Bangkok, the Food

No trip to Bangkok would be complete without the fleecing experience of being swindled by the friends of a dodgy tuk-tuk driver. If you’re super lucky, you don’t learn from the first experience and get taken for a ride, as such, twice.

Our first experience may have been our fault: 1. For being unclear and 2. For not speaking Thai. We asked for Chinatown. We got our friendly tuk-tuk driver’s friend’s Chinese restaurant a neat four kilometers from Chinatown. But no worries, he smiled, we smiled, the restauranteur smiled and crisis was averted.

And then we got lost for two hours, on foot this time, trying to find the menagerie of night market stalls, roadside restaurants and bright lights that comprised Bangkok’s Chinatown. The streets were crammed with people, more than we’d seen in any other part of the city so far. Makeshift pop-up restaurants littered the pavement and we finally decided on a particularly bustling one that promised fresh grilled prawns for 200 baht (about 4 pounds) a plate. Amongst our place with the foreigners, both European and Asian, locals, both old and young, and weird couples, European man with a lady of the night, we stuck out only slightly.

But one gigantic plate of grilled prawns, another of grilled squid and a huge vat of Tom Yum later, we were sufficiently content. Then we got the bill and were greatly contented—roughly £10 total for an all-star freshly caught seafood meal.
Jon and our prawns
squid and tom yum!

We paid and walked into what looked like the throwback to Kmart's less successful twin brother, had a series of interesting times trying to hail down a cab and ended up where we started--in the back of a tuk-tuk. Transported through a land of air and noise pollution, we headed back to our hotel to await the next day's tuk-tuk trauma.

Bangkok Rock City

It is hot and loud and sweaty in Bangkok. It is chaotic and turbulent and ridiculous. I saw a family of five riding a small vespa. i witnessed a monkey's cage strapped to the back of a taxi car. I got harassed by at least 252 Thai men, women and children selling suits, cds, tshirts, bracelets, buddhas, ping pong, incense...and i loved it.

Of course we did the tourist thing and stayed right off the Khao San Road. But unlike most of the tourists, we ate and shopped and drank and then we moved on.

first glimpses of our three-point-nine days in the hub of southeast asia...







I've never tried to smoke my alcohol; i guess that's where i've been going wrong all this time. Yay Bangkok!