The mission: see Bangkok in four days.
Our base number 1 (two nights) was the Khao San Road area of Bangkok. It's backpacker central, which is why we went! The road is a tourist attraction in itself, full of cut-price tourist wares like hilarious t-shirts, bars that sell towers of beer and - in our case - an amazing street dancing display.
Day 1
From this base we saw the grand palace and the Siam museum. The Grand Palace is unbelievably bling. Never have I seen so many sparkly buildings so close together. The highlight was the central wat, which houses a highly revered emerald Buddha. The statue itself is quite small, but the enormous room it sits in is absolutely magnificent. Definitely the kind of thing I'm looking for in my next house..
The Siam museum was all about Thai heritage, and the heritage of Bangkok in particular. It was also free (winner) but that was because we arrived after four and only had two hours to see it all. Which was a double winner, as I'm getting a bit museumed out now. Si (unfortunately for me) is still the energiser bunny of knowledge acquisition though and I think he would have been happy to stay longer. Despite my informative-display-fatigue, the Siam museum is actually a really nice place to spend a bit of time.
Day 2
The next day we switched accommodation. We had decided we could do better than our place near Khao San and so we took all the filters off agoda.com to see what we could find. After deciding that actually we couldn't afford to do THAT much better, we stuck some of the filters back on and ended up in a place near the famous Patpong night market. Famous for ladyboys, go-go bars and touristy shopping. We took the first of many river taxis to get there, the "tube" - actually on rails over the streets - system is quite limited and the river is a well-integrated part of the public transport infrastructure.
That afternoon we shopped. After a short misfire of going to the upmarket shopping area in the centre of town and realising that we could buy pretty much everything there from home, we eventually found ourselves at the night market. We actually ended up there till about midnight, as you really have to haggle hard for everything. We learnt two important things though:
1. It's AMAZING how cheap true top quality designer goods can be if you just look in the right places.
2. Simon finds it impossible to say no to a haggling ladyboy (not like that...). Even when he was pretty much decided not to buy the tourist trinket they were selling he still ended up saying "yes" when they pouted and told him off for teasing them. I have remembered this for the future, it may come in handy one day.
We didn't visit any go-go bars, though I definitely caught Si looking!
Day 3
We combined two of our very favourite things and went on a combination food and cycle tour. The food was great and actually pretty different to all the other food we've been eating for the past four months. My favourite was egg with curry, while I think Si was in awe of the exploded catfish. The bike tour was also great, it was as very simple idea - just a ride around the colourful and crowded backstreets of Bangkok - you see things and tiny glimpses of lives that you would miss if you stuck to the main roads. There was also some traffic-dodging which was nearly as fun as cycling in London!
Day 4
That was today. I'm actually writing this at the airport as we're about to board our last flight, bound for home. Today we enjoyed our hotel's buffet breakfast (worth mentioning because we ate loads!) then went to an introductory meditation session. Si was really just babysitting me because I was a bit nervous of going alone and he totally managed to stay awake for the whole thing! I had a lovely time in the end and learnt loads. Including that the half lotus position starts hurting after about three minutes, which is an absolute b***** when you shouldn't move for an hour (which, as it turns out, is The Point). This afternoon we went for a Thai massage session at a temple massage school. It was brutal, but in a sort of feels-nice-when-it's-over way. Then we grabbed a last Pad Thai and banana roti from street stalls and made our way here to the airport...
Mission complete