BANGKOK

We arrived in Bangkok in the evening, and headed straight for Khaosan Road, as we heard it’s easy to find cheap accommodation there and a fun place to hang out. Khaosan is so full of people trying to sell us stuff e.g. some women from up in the Thai Hills Tribes that wear funny hats or headdresses who come down to Bangkok to sell their goods (hand made bracelets, wooden implements, bangles, etc). It was so loud and busy, it being the most famous street in Bangkok!

Anyway we found a nice guest house with a nice room and decided to crash for the night as we were very exhausted from the nine-hour flight from Melbourne.

Nice room, nice guest house. Haha.

We were woken up at four o’clock by a loud banging near our wall.

It got louder and louder and louder.

That was when we discovered that we were sleeping in the room next to a 7-11 building site.

Next morning we checked out early (thank God) and found another cheap guest house to dump our heavy travelling packs.

We wandered up and down Khaosan Road, browsing and haggling.

As we wandered some more, we were stopped by some nice ladies who offered to braid my hair.

It sounded pretty cool, so we picked out black and blue for the colours. They did my whole head, it took almost three hours, but we waited patiently and in the end it was definitely worth it because it looked rad (icool)

One day we took a Tuk-Tuk (strange vehicle, like a motorbike with a cart thing on the back that is used to get around the city quick, for short distances.) to the Grand Palace.

You can’t go to Bangkok without seeing the grand palace!

The palace is a collection of temples covered in gold leaf and mosaic. I reckon it was really over the top, and seriously, it isn’t really anything compared the ancient temples of Cambodia. It was all golden and that, which is beautiful in its self but I really wasn’t that blown away. The only thing that was really special was the sacred Emerald Buddha.

After Grand Palace, we caught a taxi to Pantip Plaza (the biggest electrical complex in the whole of Thailand) to buy us a laptop and a camera.

We looked at all of the laptops until we came across this beautiful one. We knew it was love!

After we finalized the laptop and had it securely strapped on to us, we headed over to iPod store to buy an iPod and then bought a nice camera. Shockproof and it takes pics underwater too!

We caught the taxi back home and discovered that our taxi driver was a bit of a freak, he kept repeating himself and wouldn’t take no for an answer .

He took us to some random travel agent, as some taxi/Tuk-Tuk drivers are given commissions for bringing in customers. On the way home was really weird as he was asking which hotel we were staying in and asking for our room number and kept saying I should be a model on the Thai catwalks. It’s made me feel nervous and scared and I was really relieved when he dropped us at our hotel.

Today we booked our trip up to Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand.

Afterwards we decided to go for a walk from the end of our street to the Ciao Praya river.

We caught a river taxi; a big ferry boat used by the locals to get around, and took it all the way up to Wat Arun. Wat Arun is an old and very tall temple with heaps of detail and mosaics. The very intricate designs must have taken hundreds of years to build. We climbed right to the top of the extremely steep stairs , carefully of course, and took lots of awesome pics. After we caught the taxi back home, we hung around the pool at our new hotel and sunbathed for a while, soaking up the sun.

Today we got up really early to take the bus to the Floating Markets. The floating market is in Kanchanaburi ; two hours out of Bangkok. The markets were originally created when the Chinese community settled in the area. Apparently the REALY market runs before 7 and the rest is for tourists only and you could tell it was set up for tourists. We bought a coconut and drank it; the coconut juice was really sweet and delicious.

After floating markets, we hopped back onto the bus and drove for about another hour and a half until we came to the Bridge on the River Kwai on the Death Railway. The Death Railway was set up when the Japanese invaded and started to build a railway right through the middle to Burma, for carrying goods and exports directly to other countries. The Japanese used the captured soldiers and prisoners of war as slaves in terrible conditions, and over 100,000 people died in the process, including many Australians, and many from other countries. We caught the train across the bridge and spotted some elephants (heffalumps!!). We headed over and fed the elephant’s sugar cane, and got to touch their trunks and took some cool pics with ‘em.

The next destination we headed for was the Tiger Temple. The Tiger temple was first started when a temple full of monks were brought a hurt tiger whose parents were killed by poachers. After that, the monks were brought so many more animals, that they set up an actual animal park.

We were able to go up to the baby tigers and take photos and pat them!

After we saw the baby tigers, we headed over to the great tiger canyon and waited in line for a picture with the great cats. In the end our battery ran out (OH NO!L) so we bought a disposable camera. The tigers were massive, and we got to have their head on our lap! The only reason we were able to have the tigers on our lap is because they all sleep in the afternoon.

Also in Bangkok we got a Tuk-Tuk around the city, and stopped to eat at maccas. The Thai Mcdonalds is same same but different!! The soft serves here are gross as! It’s pretty sad that we were eating maccas in THAILAND of all places but we wanted to see if it tasted any different.