Back in Bangkok, la la la
Trip Start
Jul 10, 2008
1
16
Trip End
Ongoing
Rambuttri road, Bangkok, British Columbia, Thailand
Friday, July 11, 2008
Mind you, we only stayed one street away, on the leafy and friendly Rambuttri Road. I think we were also so much more looking forward to getting back into the heat and madness. It was a real joy to be stepping out of Bangkok airport (at 1am cos of flight delays) into the swamping heat and tearing through the streets to get to our hotel.
We didn't do a lot this time in Bangkok. With no real time constraints on us, we've decided to linger in places more this time, rather than rush
A monk. And a flag
. It's hard to explain the heat in this part of the world. It's relentless, and now that we're into the Monsoon season, the humidity is that much worse. How humankind ever survived before air con in places like this, I'll never understand. We got to Bangkok without any real clue of where to go or what to do next, but then it occurred to us, we'd missed one country on our way over and it always felt like it was an oversight. Maybe it was time to rectify that mistake. Maybe we should go to Laos. We booked a sleeper train to Nong Khai on the Thai/Laos border and got on with enjoying Bangkok.
We stayed in the Rambuttri house hotel which was cheap, clean and nice and gets my recommendation. It was a good launch pad for, well, lots of stuff. We just didn't do lots of stuff. We shopped, I picked up some trendy camouflage shorts (as soon as I got them I started to notice every backpacker, especially the crusty ones, seemed to have a pair too. It's part of their uniform) for the months ahead, Lisa got flip-flops - essential! We spent a day at the Chatuchak weekend market which was just the best fun. It is absolutely huge. Narrow lanes betweens stalls for miles and miles. By some miracle we came out exactly were we'd gone in after about 3 hours of being utterly lost in the maze.
One part of the market we stumbled across was the puppy and kitten stalls. I'm pretty sure a lot of these gorgeous little animals won't see life for long. There was just so many of them, they were just so little, and just not enough people to give them homes. That said, the people who ran the stalls really seemed to care about the little critters
Buy me! I'm a very cute puppy....
. We walked away with fairly mixed feelings. On one side, how cute were they! On the other, how long will they last? The heat was punishing.We also did our obligatory temple visit - there's so many in Bangkok, it'd just be offensive not to - this time we went to the Wat Arun. It's a nice temple tucked away beside the Mae Nam Chao Phraya river (doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it?) and hiked a fairly dizzying hike up some steps to get a great view of Bangkok.
Seeing as we had time, Lisa went off to get herself a long overdue haircut. She arrived back about 10 minutes later with some sort of buzzcut. Okay, not that bad, but the heat, humidity and short hair made her look like a baby orang-utan. It's not that bad, but it was a bit squiffy for a couple of days.
After a couple of more strolls down the Khao San Road to watch the backpacker gobshites in all their glory, it was time for us to move on up north. We're both genuinely excited about getting to Laos. We hear it's a lot like Cambodia - friendly people, untouched - so we're excited about it.
The strange thing is that we have absolutely no regrets about leaving NZ. I thought I'd wonder if we'd jumped the gun a bit too soon, but, while it was a great place to visit, we couldn't have lived there. Sydney kind of confirmed that. It had life and vim and vigour that, sadly, NZ didn't. Moving back to UK or Ireland is a genuinely enticing prospect now, we just don't know where we're going to move to. And so the saga continues.
