Hi all
After an 11 hour flight, we arrived in the craziness that is Bangkok airport, waiting at the baggage claim..... still waiting.... no bags!!! They've been sent to Sydney :( we're told by smiley smiley people at the 'help' desk that there was a system error, but here;s 35 pounds compensation - go buy yourself something pretty...
sweaty, hour-long cab ride to the hotel (which is quite nice), straight down to Koa San Road to get some clothes, soap, toothpaste etc, we were told to haggle the price, so after hearing a dress was 450, we tried to go lower, realising later that this was less than 7 pounds. We were rubbish at haggling anyway, so we figure it's cheap anyway, why mess around...! Needless to say, after this ordeal and finally - a SHOWER! we went out for some well earned beers... yeah and cocktails... and noodles... we slept so well though!
The next morning, we had our brekkie and left the hotel, after saying no thanks to all the cabbies, we realised we had no clue where we were going, so (now dubbed) 'Taxi Man' came to our rescue and offered to show us a load of markets/temples/monuments etc for just 50B each (less than 1 pound for 3 hours), it was so amazing - pics to follow!
Then, jetlag hit and we slept in the afternoon - bad idea, as we didn't sleep that night... anyway, our bags finally turned up at 10.30 that night (thank the Lord) so again, we went out for a celebratory beer...
Next morning, 6am wakeup (no sleep though, remember!) shower, brekkie rushrushrush, to be picked up at 7... although, it was about an hour late, so no need to rush really ha!
picked up for what you ask... well, floating markets, RIDING AN ELEPHANT!!! River Kwai and the Tiger Temple.
The floating markets were pretty amazing, very busy and bustling and in general mental... then we were whisked away (the only 2 in our group to do this for some reason) to go ride an elephant, which was fan-dabi-dosi, we climbed onto him from a treehouse and sat in this 2-person bench/saddle/thing to be lead through the jungle and plunged through dirty water... well the elephant was plunged... like we said - amazing!!!!
The River Kwai was really interesting and pretty darn sad really... there's alot of World War 2 prisoner stuff that happened there, won't go into the details, as this really isn't the time or the place now is it and we only have 7 minutes left... we went on the train track which was basically rotten wood and were nearly mowed down by possibly the slowest train in the world - it was a bit scary though!
Tiger Temple was very commercialised, the tigers were chained and hoards of people went in to stroke them, we were a bit disgusted by it, they did look healthy etc, but it just seemed a bit cruel. We saw th monk who founded the place and prayed with him, which was cool, but he was a bit of a grouch... maybe the heart attack last week had annoyed him or something...?
Then we left, 3 hours later, we arrived at our hotel and went out for pizza... er yeah, that Thai delicacy...
Today we had a lie-in and have pretty much just mooched about the markets- nice!
Well, 1 minute left so gotta go

love you all
xxxxx