After another uneventful journey (this time no turbulence) we finally made it to Bangkok airport. We were supposed to meet my friend Sam from home and his friend Henry so we could share a taxi to the centre but our flight was late and they had already left without us. After a panicky 10 minutes of navigating the customs and baggage reclaim, which were surprisingly misleading, we finally made it out to the entrance hall. We quickly went to the nearest ATM, logged onto wifi to contact our families before heading to the taxi rank. Unfortunately we didn't know the custom so we missed out on the ticket machine and were aimlessly wandering the ranks for a while wondering why the empty taxis were ignoring us. After finally retrieving a ticket, we marched off in the direction of taxi 11 and were making our way to Khao San Road - the biggest strip in Bangkok.

On the journey through, Bangkok seemed relatively civilised - big buildings, big lights, crazy driving - not a lot different to other places I've been. But then we arrived at Khao San Road and realised that we had booked into a hostel on possibly one of the busiest streets in the world at night time. We literally had to push our way through, hot and sweaty from our flight, encountering street food, men throwing ping pong show leaflets at us and even one placard saying 'live monkey blow job' on it - the latter made me curious. How did that work? I quickly realised I should stop dwelling and move on. Khao San Road is like that - mental, life changing and exposing you to a completely different way of thinking.

Miraculously, Henry and Sam had checked into the same hostel and 10 minutes later were knocking our bedroom door. It was absolutely mental seeing my childhood friend in such a crazy place - never could we have thought this would happen when we met at 13 years old!

We decided to go out and grab something to eat - we finally found a quiet restaurant where we could sit down and get to know each other (Charlotte and Gem didn't know ether of them at this point). We ordered some simple chicken and rice and some beers. They all seemed to get on really well so we moved onto a cool bar that was playing live music and ordered 2 buckets between us girls and a 3 litre beer tower for the 2 guys. At this point, we thought that we were just going to see Sam and Henry for one night and one set of drinks, but I soon discovered that both parties really got on and that the two boys would tag along until they got bored.

We went to one last bar before retiring, selling really cheap drinks and watched a crazy dance off in the middle of the street with a 6 year old little boy being the main feature. In the morning, we found out that Henry and Sam had stayed out until 4 in the morning and had eaten tarantula, scorpion and cockroaches!