Bangkok is not what we were expecting. It's far better! We got here late last night and had to scramble around to find a room in khao san rd -we managed to gank the last available room in one guesthouse. The room is pretty nice with aircon, which apparently almost blew up during the night. People down on the street were questioning what the high pitched squeal /motorbike noise was! Heath woke up and turned it off but i managed to sleep through the whole thing. We had a bizzare/great day today. Decided to visit the zoo and palace grounds and on the way there we somehow ended up talking to a guy walking ahead of us. Turns out he worked for the Tourism board in Chiang Mai and was holidaying in Bangkok. We stopped and chatted for a long while and he gave us some good advice, then wrote out a whole intinerary of sightseeing in thai for us and advised that a tuk tuk driver should take us to all the places for 20baht (less than A$1). Lo and behold there was a tuk-tuk driver on the corner who spoke very good English and agreed to take us for that price (and no, he wasn't in cahouts with the tourism board guy!) So we basically had a personal driver for the day, he waited outside all the places and the only catch was that we had to go to a couple of shops. He was very honest about this and explained he got petrol coupons for bringing us there, so if we could just go inside for 10 minutes he would get free petrol. We were happy to do this for him as he ws so upfront, and inside the shops there was no hard-sell - if we had more disposable cash we probably would have purchased something! He also took us to the booking office, so we're now scheduled to go to Chiang Mai on an overnight train on Monday and return Saturday morning so we can catch our flight to Delhi in the afternoon. After we'd seen the various temples and buddah statues in the morning (half of which we couldn't actually go into as it's Buddah day today - the monks were praying inside) our driver dropped us at the zoo and we spent a very pleasant afternoon wandering around. The zoo was a nice escape from the busyness of Bangkok but I felt very sorry for some of the animals - their enclosures could have done with some tlc. I think we've become pretty suspicious over the last couple of weeks of people offering services, so it was really heartening today to have someone genuinely wish to be helpful without expecting anything in return. If the guy in the street hadn't been so friendly we would have had a very different day! Last thing (this is a much bigger post than intended!) It looks like Heath has a job lined up for him in Durham! He got an email today to say he just needs to get in contact with the company and they'll be happy to have him, so that's really good news!