[Bangkok, Thailand] Sleep, Shops and Sights. After our noisy night in the Orchid we got up early and went in search of better accommodation further from the noise of Khaosan road.

The roads were deserted and most shops closed since they are open until the early hours of the morning. We spent a bit of time checking options and settled on ‘The Happy House’ with better quality quite room. It’s not far from where I stayed 10 years ago but the area is barely recognizable. The street has been paved and is overwhelmed by flea market type stalls but at least they made an effort to keep the trees so it feels cooler. I was able to match one upgraded restaurant with my fallible memories. An obvious omission is the call of ‘Cold water, five Baht’. It seems the ever present ladies with buckets of government standard drinking water have been replaced with a 7-11 every 100m selling brand name bottled water and everything else a traveler could want in convenient travel sized portions. Our new hotel was comfy. Maybe too comfy… V passed out and didn’t wake up until it was dark 🙂 Now we’re on holiday!

Day 2 in Bangkok started off with a walk to the Grand Palace. We don’t normally get caught by scams but neither of us (me especially) were firing on all cylinders. At the entrance to the Palace we were directed away by an official looking guy and after walking some distance were told by another well dressed guy posing as a tourist policeman that the palace was closed until 13h. He then tried to hook us up with a tak-tak tour around some other sites. Confused and annoyed we decided (well thanks to V) to change our plans and head back to the hotel instead of being dragged around town in a tak-tak. Turns out the palace was open. All we needed to do was walk in. The entrance is not obvious and we guess these guys work in teams to get people onto the well known tak-tak tours of selected clothing and jewelery stores! After that failure and reboot we opted to go shopping instead and grabbed a taxi to the MKB shopping centre in the heart of the city. MKB is insane. It’s a packed with every shop imaginable and then stuffed with floors and isles of flea market style stalls. V found a couple of things she needed (like flip flops – so she can get rid of that strop tan!) and I got some more memory cards. For sups we managed to meet up with Manouk from our Tibet tour. It was great to see her again after bumping into her in Luang Prabang but she’s heading home now so we’ll just have to keep traveling around the world until we get to Holland 🙂

Okay. Day 3. Time to get serious about the sights (well just a little). We got to the Grand Palace and attached wats without trouble. The place is still amazing even with severe dejavue buzzing my brain. They are doing a lot of restoration work at the moment and I seem to remember it being much shinier close up but the overall effect is still one of WOW. Thankfully it was a little overcast and after walking our feet off around the Emerald (jade) Buddha, Grand Palace and museums we headed for Wat Pho and the Reclining Buddha. Still lazing about after 10 more years – same silly grin. It’s a hard life being an icon.

With those sights ticked off we were starving and decided to make good on our promise to find an Outback Steakhouse. Siam Centre, the largest shopping complex in Asia, had an Outback so it was back to the city centre for us. We gouged ourselves on steak and polished off a monster chocolate brownie. Too stuffed to shop we headed back to the Khaosan area.

Bangkok’s been an interesting (at time challenging) stroll down memory lane for me and I think a great experience for V. We are both very excited about our PADI course in Khao Lak next week but that will have to wait. Tomorrow we head out early by train to Kanchanaburi so V can pet a tiger.

[Pictures from the gallery: Chicken Men and the Emerald Buddha. The Grand Palace and gardens. English guards paying Royalties 🙂 The Lazy Buddha.]

Pilgrims/Tourists making noise and apparently wishes at the Lazy Buddha

– Posted from my iPhone via WiFi