Today we got up at 5.30am, had breakfast as soon as it opened at 6am and then got ourselves ready and down in the foyer to be picked up for our tour to the Maeklong Market and the swimming monkeys. It was pouring with rain so probably a good day for a tour rather than walking around Bangkok. After picking up another person from their hotel we drove for about 2 hours out of Bangkok to Maeklong. The market there is on the train lines so when a train comes through t...

Today we set out on a walk around Chinatown as per the Lonely Planet walking tour suggestion. Equipped with photocopies from our guide book we caught the skytrain and the underground metro to the main train station, Hualamphong Station. From there we crossed a busy intersection and made our way to our first stop, Wat Traimit, the Temple of the Golden Buddha whose claim to fame was unsurprisingly a large Buddha statue made of solid gold. Apparently it weighs about...

Today we slept in a bit despite the room's alarm clock going off at a minute past midnight just as we were nodding off to sleep. We still can't work out how to turn it off so we set it for 10am so it'll only annoy housekeeping as it launches into an electronic version of "We wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy new year". We had breakfast at the hotel which wasn't too bad and then realised we had taken our Myki card instead of the room keycard....

Our flight left on time and managed to get two seats on their own which meant we didn't have to share the row with anyone else. There was plenty of legroom for cattle class and the food was good for airline food. While we had some control over where we sat we had no control over who sat behind us. As it turned out we had a couple of real hillbillies behind us. The guy who sat behind us decided he had to use our headrest as his leverage point whenever he got o...

We eventually arrived in Bangkok, cleared customs and immigration, picked up our bags and wandered through the nothing to declare exit past the staff all sitting in a circle having a chat. We went to the meetingpoint where our transfer to the hotel was supposed to meet us. No one there was holding a sign for us or our hotel so we waited a bit, walked around looking for them and then went to the Novotel airport hotel counter as we were staying at the Novotel in th...