So after a very long flight and bus trip we finally made it to our hostel in Bangkok - which is clean and has very friendly staff and was exactly what I needed after 13 hours of travel.
Woke up this morning at 5am unable to sleep so I planned some adventures for the day. Had a very nice very cheap breakfast at the hostel for $2, eggs toast croissant coffee juice etc - a great start to the day and headed out to the shopping hub of the city. Firstly it must be mentioned that the traffic here is INSANE. It is almost impossible to cross the road without running out of the way of a flying vehicle, no matter what colour the lights are. I've gotten into the habit of following the Thai people when they cross cause they have it worked out very well :-). One thing that impressed me was that the traffic lights have countdown timers next to them so you know exactly how long you'll be waiting until the light is green again. Brilliant.
The shopping centres are incredible. I could spend days inside just looking at all the shops and advertisements. We bought a Nancy Chandler's map of the city which is really helpful and found our way down to the streets.
From Siam square we got in our first Tuk Tuk to head to another part of town. The drivers are clever dudes, ours quoted us a price of 150 baht (around $5 aud) and we managed to barter with him getting it down to 20 baht. He seemed pretty impressed that we weren't stupid enough to take the first price.
The Tuk Tuk ride was my first near death experience of the trip, there were several times when I just held on for dear life in hope that I would survive darting across 5 lanes of heavily congested and fast paced traffic... somehow we made it out unscathed. However despite the fact that we arranged to be dropped off at the train station to book our next part of the journey, we somehow conveniently managed to be taken to two separate dodgy travel agents wanting to give us 'special price today only' holiday packages, which were of course crazily over priced and not what we needed. Eventually after stern words with the driver we got our tickets from the right place and headed back to the sky train to take us to the weekend markets. There we helped some gorgeous little Thai students with their english as they were on a school excursion and it restored my faith in the Thai people.
The markets were fantastic. Aside from the fact that it was boiling hot and I was a sweating frizz ball we managed to buy pad see ew from a street vendor for $1.50 and it was amazing. There are tables of fresh herbs and salad for you to garnish your own dishes with and it is just perfect. I also managed to find my first patch of the journey which completed my day and bought a pair of knock off ray bans for $3.
We just booked a trip to the local floating markets for tomorrow morning and are heading to the red light district to see what its all about... no doubt I'll have some more stories soon!
