Bangkok

The floating market

The swift three day visit to Sydney ended with a 9 hour flight to Bangkok in Thailand, our fourth country in  eight days so we were ready to take things just a little bit easier. There was no chance of that.

Bangkok is huge, crowded, chaotic, stiflingly hot, with modern, efficient skytrains and undergrounds whizzing commuters and tourists all over the city, from massive and unbelievably designed shopping malls to stunning ancient palaces and temples. In the midst of all this are thousands of smiling street vendors creating the most delicious food at ridculously cheap prices, and an equal number of fat, bald, 50-something westerners with a Thai bride, girlfriend, hooker, ‘gaysian’, ladyboy on their arm. Scarily its quite difficult to tell the difference. It’s a fascinating and invigorating city, perfect for people watching and a complete assault on the senses.

Our main aim was to obtain our Burmese visas so we immediately had to delve into the fast pace and negotiate the sophisticated train system to drop in our application and then experience the city for a few days whislt we waited to collect it.

Worship at the reclining Buddha

Asian markets are fascinating places to visit and Bangkok has some exceptional ones. The weekend market is a maze of 15,000 stalls selling just about everything, mostly food, where you can buy a tasty Thai curry and jasmine rice for as little as 60 pence. The floating night market at Ampawa is a beautiful place where little old Thai ladies on their cramped long tail boats, cook up the most delicious seafood and serve it to the queue of hungry people sat on the riverbank. The strangest market of all though is the train market, which quite logically you would think is a market on a train. Not quite. It acually spreads across the railway line where the awnings meet to form a narrow covered walkway just above your head. It only becomes strange when you discover that eight times a day a train passes through so eight times a day the whole market has to be moved and moved back again to let the train somehow squeeze past. 

After five months of South American food Vanessa was in Thai food heaven so every evening we immersed ourselves into the smells and tastes coming from every street corner but we did drag ourselves off to bar one evening called The Iron Fairies which was described as ‘a disused iron fairy works in Paris circa 1912’. Small, dark and dingy but miraculously still enough room for a five piece jazz band. It was a bizarre night.

We collected our Burmese visas but before leaving Bangkok we paid a visit to the Grand Palace set in stunning grounds with ancient temples at every turn. The biggest attraction though is the massive, golden reclining Buddha, stretching 46m long and 15m high.

We loved Bangkok, but 24 consecutive days in cities was taking its toll.  Thailand’s islands were calling us.