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  Bangkok, Thailand
Monday, May 14, 2007

So we flew to Thailand yesterday morning from Kota Kinabalu with Air Asia - hopefully this is the last flight of the trip. I've been saying that since Singapore, but I still mean it.

Bangkok seems to be the centre of all backpacker activity in Southeast Asia, and the Khao San Road is the centre of that. We've seen more travellers here in the first three hours than we did in the whole of Borneo. All ages too, from 17 year olds on gap years to retirees with expensive cameras, and everything in between, all in various stages of dodgy "asian traveller" attire. And no, I don't exempt us from that either, although I'm being a bit more restrained on this trip I hope. (I seem to remember thinking a yellow "om" shoulder bag was just the thing to have when I was in India, complemented my pyjamas quite well I thought...)

Anyways, we have yet to fully experience the madness as we arrived very early in the morning before all of the stalls were set up, and we were tucked up in bed by 7.30 to recover from the past five mornings of pre-5am starts and the long bus journeys. But never fear, tonight we will suss it out.

Bangkok has everything you could need as a tourist: loads of accommodation of all types, plenty of internet access, cheap clothing and travel gear (mostly fakes), fake student/press cards, laundry, visa services, travel agents, cheap food and beer, etc - the list goes on. (also plenty of stuff you definitely don't need, like the aforementioned traveller gear, clockwork giant butterflies, ladyboys, ladies with 'skills' - I won't go on). So we need to finally stop postponing it and organise our visas for the trans-Mongolian. We need to visit the Vietnamese, Chinese, Mongolian and Russian visas and hope that none of them wants to hold our passports for too long or we'll be here much longer than we'd hoped! This also means we have to choose our dates carefully - something we've been avoiding but is now inevitable. The days of idly wandering about are over! Next major stop will probably be Cambodia to see Angkor Wat and see the country, although we'll see. We'll meet with Nicky and Jason after their Koh Tao trip when they get back to Bangkok on Tuesday and decide then.

...

We ended up spending a week in Bangkok. We started with our Mongolian visa, which was a laugh - it took us two hours to find the bloody embassy which isn't actually on the street given as it's address. The numbers don't go in order, they refer to lot numbers, and so it was a frustrating experience. They were closed. So we had to go back a second time the following morning to hand in our passports, and then a third time two days later to pick it up. But hey-ho, one down.

We met Nicky and Jason after their amazing dive trip and had a good catch up. We all went for a wander to a few of the big temples in Bangkok followed by a leisurely stroll through Chinatown, including an exploration of the dodgy little back alleys about the place - thanks Jason. We did get to drink free ice teas in a Chinese tea shop, which I think was due to my reaction to finding a cockroach climbing up my shin (think knee-jerk), much to the hilarity of the girls who worked there. Afterwards we headed for the Paragon centre in the Siam Square area of Bangkok which is more like London or New York than Thailand. We sampled some beautiful food in the gourmet food market, went to see not one but TWO films at the fantastic cinema there, and generally acted like Brits abroad who wanted to be back at home. I blame the other pair, we were doing alright till they arrived!

Nicky and Jason headed for Chiang Mai on Friday morning and we headed for Cambodia - we'll hook up with them later in the trip all going well...