After three months of traveling through Europe, and another three spending time with family in the UK, we are traveling once again. We have a total of five months (give or take) to fully explore South East Asia before returning to life and work as we know it! And this is how we find ourselves slightly spaced out and hideously jet lagged in Bangkok.
Looking back on our travels through Europe, we have had an amazing time. Tash really put traveling aside when we met to get me to Australia and returning together to see everything together was a great experience. Backpacking in Europe was a good way of testing our packs (and backs) and gave us an idea of what we did and didn't need equipment wise. We are carrying so much less for Asia because of this, even though we have extra equipment such as mosquito nets, headlamps and hiking equipment!
We also realised after Europe that we needed to do something uncharacteristic for us - create an itinerary and book things in advance. To most people this would be a basic thing to do but we have enough structure in our daily lives without planning every detail of our trips! This changed when we realised we wanted to go on treks, climb mountains and go on safari's in Borneo.
Bangkok is as crazy as we could have imagined with Tuk Tuks flying everywhere, noise, pollution and locals selling food, goods and the promise of cheap travel everywhere (which isn't genuine in lots of cases - so many scams!). The lonely planet guide we are using describes Bangkok as exhilarating and exhausting at the same time; we couldn't agree more especially with jet leg! The city is seriously busy and is quite disorientating so we have mainly been traveling around (to start) in taxis and Tuk Tuks. The Tuk Tuk drivers make you appreciate taking out health insurance; we swear our driver, who took us back to where we are staying, was drunk last night and was pretending to be a rally driver!
We visited the Grand Palace yesterday which was extravagant despite being very busy. We also headed to Chinatown for lunch and to the crazy bright and busy Siam Square to get some shopping. As we both love Thai cuisine the food is amazing; spicy, different flavors and not too challenging - we'll wait until we are into the rural areas before we start trying the bugs.
From now, we have five more days here before heading south east traveling along the south eastern seaboard through Kochang, Kampot and into Cambodia. So good to be traveling again and to be back in the heat.
