Day 2: Bangkok Scams and Sunsets

We overslept...

We woke up at midday and even that was a struggle.

We headed down for a dip in the pool, which we had to ourselves except for an small army of people cleaning & maintaining everything in sight. Which explains why everything here is immaculate!

Post swim we headed out to do the cultural bit. We got off the train and ran straight into a very well placed man, uber friendly, who told us 'the temples were too far to walk and they were closed anyway... what we wanted to do was a boat tour of old Bangkok.'

Without a seconds hesitation we were bundled into a Tuk tuk and on our way down a strange little back alley with the distinct feeling we were being taken for a ride.

We arrived at the River Cruise place and were shown to our own long boat for a private tour... it was £40... which is probably way too much but it ended up being really fun. 

We saw old Bangkok built on stilts out of the river, we saw people swimming, fishing, praying at the temples and just doing their day to day in their homes all from the comfort of a boat with a couple of Singha beers.

We were dropped off at market and once again redirected with by another friendly guy 'in the know' (the thing is that everyone is so nice that you don't even mind being 'redirected') in this case we were redirected to the temple of the standing Buddha, a tailors and then finally the Khao San Road- where we actually wanted to be.

24 hours in

Temple of the standing Buddha

The Khao San road was a lot nicer than we'd imagined (which as we found out is because we weren't on the Khao San Road... to be explained). By this time we had been in Thailand for over 48hrs and so naturally Dave was desperate for a pizza!

After pizza we perused market stalls and bars and soaked it all in. At the end of what we thought was the Khao San road we came across a sign which said 'Short Cut to the Khao San Road' a bit confused we decided to take the short cut...

It lead down the darkest scariest alley we encountered in Thailand, we were convinced mugging and death were on the cards, still we ventured on.

Death Alley Shortcut... it was pitch black

At the end of death all there was another sign 'This is not the end! Go up the stairs and down the other side.' It felt like we had come too far to go back so up the stairs we went. We came out in a travel agents... down the stairs and we were in a bar... we stepped out of the Bar... Now this was the Khao San Road!

Drinks, lady boys and cheap T-shirts...

After too much of all of the above (well, alright.... not all of the above..... None of the t-shirts were very nice) we settled down for a few beers in a noisy bar kicking out the stones. After approximately 9 seconds, the chap next to us introduced himself by singing the stones at the top of his voices and they ended up joining us for late night grub and waaaay too many drinks!

Bangkok has us now!