After an 8.5 hour flight to Kuala Lumpur and a 2 hour flight onwards to Bangkok, we arrived! It was after midnight and the line to get through immigration was crazy. As a British citizen we are entitled to a 30 day visa exemption. This just takes quite a bit of time to process by border control. By the time we made it to the luggage carousel it was saying last call on bags… too efficient! We grabbed our bags and proceeded to the phone shop to buy a Thai sim card. I had researched the best one before we got there so it was pretty painless to just purchase the sim card and learn how to check our balance. 20Gb of data and 150 baht calling credit to be used within 30 days for around £28. Not the cheapest, but at least this time we won’t be worrying about using maps and doing research on the move like in New Zealand.

We took a taxi to our accommodation which had been booked since February 2016. We wanted all of our accommodation after flights to be arranged, but low and behold.. a problem occurred. So, it turns out, after a lengthy phone conversation with her manager who spoke better English, that our room had been double booked and the other people got it. Bear in mind it was 1am and we were in a new country. What was going to happen now? Rightly so, the hotel found us another, better, accommodation and they walked us over there apologising repeatedly about the whole ordeal. Finally we were able to rest our head and get some sleep.

We had a complimentary breakfast at our new accommodation which was brilliant, so after a lovely lie in we enjoyed that. Our main job of the day was to start booking our onward travel firstly to Koh Chang, back to Bangkok and then up to Chiang Mai. The next drama then occurred. Even though normally you would only need to book the overnight train to Chiang Mai 3ish days in advanced, all the trains on the day we wanted to travel were booked up. Something about a long weekend. Eventually this very helpful tour operator lady managed to find us a train and we haggled a very good deal out of her. 4 x 6 hour coach, 4 x 45 min ferry, 2 x 14 overnight train = £75. I don’t know if we’d be able to get to Bristol from Redruth one way for that. Amazing!!

With all of our admin completed it was time to explore the city. We were 1 street over from Khaosan Road which is notorious as being the backpacker central of Bangkok. We decided to have a walk down the road and soak up the atmosphere. During the day there is a great atmosphere, but in the evening it is unbelievable. As we found out later. Khaosan Road is full of vendors selling all sorts of clothes, souvenirs and food items, there are tuk tuks everywhere, mopeds everywhere and people from all over the World. We really enjoyed it. After this we decided to hunt down some food and enjoyed a thai red and thai green curry between us. Beautiful and super cheap. There is a road called Rambutturi just West of Khaosan and we loved this street just as much. The whole area was brilliant really.

We headed to the river ferry pier (Phra Arthit) and paid a grand total of 28 baht (65p) for both of us to travel for about 45 minutes down to Saphan Taksin pier where we would be able to connect to the sky train to get where we were going. The river ferry boats are an experience in themselves. Every time you reach a pier a man climbs off the boats, hooks the boat up,  whistles instructions to the skipper, has the passengers off and on, and leaves the pier all within about 45 seconds. So unbelievably efficient. You are packed on there like sardines though. An interesting experience.

We made it to our first stop, Jim Thompson’s House. All of the itineraries we had looked at for 3/4 days in Bangkok said it was a must do stop and it really was very interesting. Jim Thompson was an American man who was in the Army during World War 2. He was sent to Asia after World War 2 and fell in love with Thailand. He decided that he would eventually move back, even though his wife didn’t want to go with him (they got divorced). When he made it to Bangkok he built a traditional Thai House, which is what we were lucky enough to be able to look around. The house was absolutely beautiful, as were the gardens. We had a tour guide who showed us some of his possessions as well as what a traditional Thai house is like and why. We later found out that Jim Thompson went missing a few days after his 61st birthday, whilst holidaying in Malaysia. To this day, they don’t know what happened to him, but he did sort his will out a few days previously. Jim Thompson played a massive role in getting Thai silk to the USA by showing the fabrics to designers and getting the fabrics into Vogue magazine. His silk factory is still producing now.

After Jim Thompson’s House we went to the MBK centre which is a massive shopping complex which spans over 7 floors. There are traditional stores, but the majority of the vendors are in stall like structures. It was really interesting to walk around and we had a 40p Dunkin donut each. Yummy!! We weren’t very hungry from our meal earlier so grabbed some spring rolls and a bottle of Chang each from Khaosan Road on the way home and watched some movies in the room (we had 3 channels of movies to choose from – luxury).

The next day was Temple day. Nothing could have prepared for the chaos that we saw on this day. Luckily, we didn’t have to travel as far on the river ferry today to get to our first stop – The Grand Palace. The Grand Palace was once the official resident of the Thai King, the Royal Court and the administrative seat of government. Even though this now isn’t the case, it is known as the spiritual heart of Thailand. The whole place is pretty confusing to negotiate, with loads of random buildings everywhere. Eventually though we made it through about 3 security checks, paid our 500 baht each (pretty expensive) and made it into the main event.

Some of the main sights are Wat Phra Kaew, which is home to the 14th century emerald buddha. This temple is considered to be the most important Buddhist Temple in Thailand. Surrounding the main temple are lots of beautiful buildings which we enjoyed looking at as we walked around. The Grand Palace was absolutely packed when we visited and as the country is still in mourning for the Thai King there were a lot of Thai people paying their respects whilst we were there. We later spoke to a taxi driver who told us that most of the countries residents will make the journey to The Grand Palace during the year of mourning.

We also saw the throne halls and royal residences (from the outside) which are also very impressive buildings, but of a far more European style.

After The Grand Palace we walked to Wat Pho which is another Buddhist Temple Complex which houses the Reclining Buddha. I honestly had not expected the reclining Buddha to be slow large (150 foot in length)! It was unbelievably amazing to see and both of our highlight of the day.The entire Wat Pho complex is beautiful and we spent some time looking at the Buddhist statues, Chinese statues and the beautiful pillars.

It was time to stop for some food and Simon chose a lovely little cafe where we were able to enjoy some more delicious Thai food. There are so many beautiful dishes that we are yet to see typically in the UK so I really do encourage you to go out of your way to try some of these.

We had one more stop, which was to Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn). We had to hop on the river ferry to get to the other side, but it was worth it. This temple had a completely different feel to it and the mosaic architecture on the buildings was just amazing. Unfortunately, the main pillar had scaffolding all over it so it wasn’t as impressive as we would have hoped, but we’re still really glad we looked around.

We had decided earlier that we were going to head out to Khaosan Road for dinner the next night and have a few drinks. It was time to crack open our last bottle of red wine from Hunter Valley so we enjoyed a few drinks before heading out. We found a lovely little cafe where we were able to sit on the street and watch the people go by. There was also a man playing lots of Western songs on his guitar. He was really good. We ordered some large Changs and ordered our food. I think this is the most appropriate time to talk about Chang. Chang is a very traditional Thai beer that is super cheap. Having a small one in the room the night before, we both really enjoyed it. It’s light and reminded us a little of corona without the lime, which is just what we wanted. Now, the bad side of Chang. We have heard that Chang isn’t regulated that well. Meaning, even though the bottle says 5.2%, some Chang’s have been recorded as having up to 12% alcohol content. When you are drinking large bottles (620ml) you can see where this will end up. We ended up having 3 large bottles each and had a good little boogie in our seats at other bar later on (check out the videos on fb). We had a great night, but I was a little dizzy and had a bit of a headache the next morning. I will be limiting myself to 2 large Changs from now on. We really enjoyed walking up and down Khaosan Road and enjoying the atmosphere of the place. It comes alive at night! I really can’t explain the feeling of being there, but as I said we loved it.

The next morning was a write off. We went down to breakfast and then went back to bed for a bit. haha! Silly Chang. I have to say I was expecting a full blown hangover from the way I felt when I went to bed, but I was just tired and had a little headache. Eventually though, we emerged and headed out again. There wasn’t much else that we wanted to do in Bangkok so we headed back to the MBK shopping centre. We were enjoying just experiencing the buzz of the city rather than ‘doing’ too much, so this suited us well. Simon needed a haircut (£4 – wash, cut, wash, blowdry and style), we went to pizza hut (we had lasted long enough on Thai food) and we bought some bits that we needed, including a go pro stick. After this we headed to Hard Rock Cafe for our obligatory cocktail so that we could get the glass. Yummy!

We headed back the same way we got there, using Uber. We’re quite new to Uber, but it works brilliantly, often being far cheaper than the taxi drivers who will try to not use the meter and charge you too much. We met a lovely guy on our journey back to the hotel. He wanted to practice his English and we learnt that he didn’t really like it much in Bangkok. Too loud, too smelly, too polluted. He told us he would like to travel to ‘English’ in a few years to practice his English and to touch snow. We may have told him that that was pretty unlikely. He was so sweet and hearing about his family was so lovely. His family was from an Eastern province where there are lots of buffalo. He had a buffalo teddy in his car so we took a photo with it… obviously.

The next day we were leaving really early to start our journey to Koh Chang, for some island living, so we grabbed some street pad thai and got an early night. No more Changs for us for a few days.