Bangkok

Hello Tim here, so we have left the island of Koh Tao and headed to the city of Bangkok. To do this we took the fast cat of the island and then the direct bus all the way into Bangkok, the journey took about8 and a half hours and was not too bad because the bus was a good one.

Once we had arrived into the city the bus took us to the main backpackers area of Banglamphu and the Khao San road, from here we put on our navigating caps and found a hotel just of the main busy drag called the Rambotree village Inn. The hotel was set in a nice courtyard with a big fish pound along with a few internet cafes and resturants, one of which did a great breakfastwith marmalade and toast and because of this it became the place we always went to each mornings.

The first day in the city we took it easy because by now we know that everything in cities takes a long time to do. For example the simple task of getting to the bus station on public transport to pick up tickets for our next destination took us over 2 hours, what fun.We only did one thing on the first day and that was to go the temple of Wat Pho which is the biggest and most elaborate Buddhist temple in all of Thailand. The temple was a maze of small temples and Buddha and you could explore for days, the whole place was decorated in gold and other shiny things, like mirrors and glass. The main temple also housed the largest reclining Buddha in Thailand, a massive 46m long and 15m high, have a look at the pics. The reclining image was amazing to look at but also very hard to take photos because it was too big and there were many tourists all trying to do the same thing. Once we left the temp le we headed back and relaxed got some food from a street stall and went to bed.

The following day Anna had read about a nice park near to the city palace, so we took a few boat stops up the river and started the walk to the park. The walk was really interesting, taking us into massive food markets that sold everything from veg to live toads and turtles all for eating and along dizzy streets with all kinds of shops on. It took about an hour to walk to the park and it was very very hot, but once we were at the park it was all a bit off a letdown. It was all much manicured and there was not really much to see or any places to relax, but it did have an interesting museum on elephants. As you can guess by this time our walk to the park had eaten up most of the day so we started to head back and chill out. On the way back we did some shopping on the Khao San road, I got some shorts that started to fall apart within a day and a t-shirts that I don't have much hope for either.

We had heard from a few people that we should take a look at the MBK shopping centre in Bangkok because it was meant to have everything and we quite fancied watching a film there. On the way to the MBK we had to make a stop at the Singapore airlines office to change some details on our tickets so we could flight out from Bangkok instead to Hanoi in Vietnam. For once we managed to find the office and we had no problems changing the tickets, which was a real relief after the problems we had in Sri Lanka.

The MBK was vast and a real eye opener, you could pick up anything here and most of it was fake stuff, we just strolled around having a look and in the end getting to over whelmed by the whole thing, so we headed for the 7th floor to watch a film. We watched the new Batman film and we both loved it. For both of us to watch the film it cost us 200 TB or about £1.30 each, and at the beginning of the film you all have to sand to pay your respects to the king, they really love there king in Thailand. After the film we took the bus back to the hotel and picked up of Pat thi for dinner before saying our goodnight.

On our last day we spent half of it just getting some bus tickets for the next day from the North bus terminal and on the way back we did a bit more shopping / site seeing. By the end of the day we were both shattered and were looking forward to getting out of the city the next day. Bangkok was great fun but hard work and we found it really hot in our hotel, so much so that by the time we left we had decided that the next hotel we stay at in a big city must have aircon.

On our final day we packed our bags and got a taxi to the bus station were we set of to the town of Sukhothi to look at the old city and the amazing ruins that are everywhere?