From Phi phi island, i somehow managed to wrest myself out of bed to catch the ferry to phuket. i was still terribly sick, and when we got to phuket finally, after a cold ferry ride, i passed out in our hotel room and stayed there the whole time until the next morning. Landon went out and explored the town a bit. The next morning, i felt like a million bucks so we decided it was a good idea for me to go to the hospital as per laurents instructions to see a cardiologist. this is to ensure when i write a "ko lanta -revisited" blog i can tell you stories about scuba diving. and after alot of waiting around and ALOT of baht(punishment for not doing it in canada sooner, free), i was rewarded with a certificate granting me permission! now all i have to do is get the balls to do it. anyways, while i was doing this Landon had her own adventure on the phuket beaches all day, so after buying a switchblade at the mall, and my first huge meal since being sick, we met up at our NEW hotel for the day. we switch hotels often... we like to get a taste of what many other places have to offer. in fact, in our entire time in SE asia i don't think we've stayed in the same place more than 2 nights... that tangent said, our new hotel was the on on hotel. once again we are tracking leo dicaprio's footsteps as "the beach" (which i still haven't seen) was filmed here, and passed as a sketchy guest house on khaosan road in bangkok. it was a nasty place, but it was cheaper than our first hotel in phuket. from there we booked our passage to bangkok, and after a nasty disagreement later we found ourselves coming to many compromises that have had us much better together since. anyways, phuket wasn't too much of an experience for me... like phi phi, it was half marred with a terrible sickness, so there really isn't much else to write on the subject.
the bus to bangkok was at 1pm the next day, and it had us arriving in the country capital 5 am the next morning. pretty brutal... however we were quite swift in finding a very nice hotel on soi rambuttri almost asap. i had a much better time in bangkok this time around, obviously. the 1st time was our first steps in SE asia and we were dumbfounded. with new confidence we walked the streets with more purpose... we planned trips along the river, by river taxi to china town... and it was a maze. any maps we had were really crappy and we frequently had to stop to reestablish exactly where we were... but it was still fun, if not really hot and humid. we eventually made our way out of a amze of alley-markets selling useless junk and onto a 'walking street' where pedestrians met traffic all the same. there were many celebratory events concerning the chinese new year, which i confess i had no idea was happening, or to this date when exactly it did happen. our main goal the whole day though it seemed was for landon to find this damned noodle shop. and it was fine, because it gave us a final destination. eventually.... i guess... we found it and it wasn't all it was hyped up to be and from there we caught a tuk tuk back to khaosan. (main tourist area)
i forgot to mention the night before this in bangkok! we went to paptong(sp?), whcih is bangkok's red light district. we caught a meter taxi there and the guy seemed to know this place, so upon arrival we went in and the price of admission was outlandish. we turned on our heels to go back out the door but the man insisted and lowered the price by about half, so we reluctantly agreed and sauntered upstairs into a darkened room with jocky westerners gawking at a thai couple fornicating on stage. i've seen porn before so there is no real shock... but some people just couldn't believe it. after they finished their dirty deed, which to me was far from arousing so much as purely entertaining, a string of females came out and performed various tricks with their nether regions.
example: picking up cigarettes with chopsticks, shooting ping pong balls, bananas and carrots into the crowd, writing "welcome to bangkok david and landon" on a piece of paper, which we have still, smoking cigarettes, shooting darts at balloons held between guest's legs and opening bottles.
the very last act, the bottle act, the woman doing it on stage urged a man beside us to come up and drink from the freshly opened bottle, and he did so, albeit reluctantly likely out of fear of the cleanliness of her va jay jay. <--lol? when she requested a 500 baht tip(approx 15$) he refused and a nasty scene ensued, which was our queue to GTFO.
the last day in bangkok we enlisted the services of a tuk tuk driver to tour us around the city, showing us wats(temples) etc. not much i can say here, at least not as much as the eventual pictures will. we did see a massive standing buddha, which was cool. i'll let the aforementioned pictures do the rest of the talking because i'm tired of writing, but that's it in a nutshell. our next course of action was a bus to trat, an easter province bordering cambodia, as to relax before our next SE asian capital city... phnom penh. those entires soon... peace for now =)
