Two days in Bangkok was all we had and probably enough to be honest. On thursday we went to find some dinner and ended up trecking into the Thai restaurant quarter after a Thai lady told us not to bother in the tourist area. We had almost given up nwhen we took a little detour round some back streets - proper residential, and then found some plastic tables and chairs and were enticed into Moo's Restaurant - presumably by Moo. As always in Thailand there was an extensive menu but the best part was that it was half the price of Khoa Sahn Road [KSR]. Its amazing that you can take a five minute walk up the road and a beer that was 120 Baht now becomes 60 and meals that were 100 baht become 50. It was pointed out to me however that the range of meals on offer is a matter of mathematics. Four types of meat [pork, chicken, beef, prawns] by 4 types of sauce [green curry, red curry, thin gloop, thick gloop] by three types of starch [rice, fried rice, noodles] equals the number of choices on the menu. Not bad.
Anyways, I predictably had thai green curry [got to be done] with teh risky choice of prawns and it was lovely but quite a bit sweeter than how I make it at home.
Friday was spent dossing around for a bit. The night before I said "what time shall we get up tim?" "oh, i've set my alarm for 8:30", no worries I'm thinking, that is until I'm waiting an hour and a half for Longley to get up ;). We had a long breakfast and wrote our diaries and then went to buy some drugs.... at Boots. It really quite surreal stepping through the glass doors and into the air conditioned blue white familiarity of Boots. There everything is, all with the boots labels, all the cosmetics and drugs and stuff. Except, for the vast majority its all less than half price. For example, my doxycyline was 500 baht approx seven quid, for 100 capsules. So thats 7p a capsule compared to the 50p it would have cost me at home.
We went for a wander that afternoon and got lost. Well not lost, we knew where we were, its just not where we wanted to be. We'd planned on going to China town but in the end just went for a walk by the river. We stopped by what must be the Thai version of a greecy cafe. It had glass windows all around and over looked the river at a crossing terminal. There were little tables and chairs and the days specials were chalked up on the walls. We shared a beer and I had some cold vergatable noodle things and we watched the late afternoon traffic as school kids made their way home. It was well timed, as we managed to shelter from the first bout of rain.
We tried once again to make our way to Chinatown but once we'd realised how little we'd come since departing we decided to sack it off. We then bumped into Finn. Finn was a northern irish guy who didnt really like anyone and his first words to us on remarking at the bollards outside the national museaum were "have they buried some f*cking cannons in teh ground there". We ended up walking back to KSR with him whilst he lectured us about when the revolution would come.
Tim is getting bored and has finished with the internet now so I'll cut a long story short.
Yesterday we travelled from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia. We had to be at the travel agents for 7.30am where we were guided to where a bus would pick us up. It was around 3 hours on the thai roads to the border where we stopped for a bite to eat and for some people to get their visas. We made it through the border okay after waiting in lots of queues and filling out a lot of forms. There was some hanging around but by 2:30 pm we were on our bus to Siem Reap. 20 of us packed into a little mini van type thing. Its a 150km journey and it took us about 6-7 hours including stops. Not fun, the potholes were ridiculous, they made ambaston lane seem like the M1 and apparently we were travelling on 'National Highway 6'. Those of you with the maths skills will realise that at most we were doing 30km/h which is less than 20 miles an hour. We everntually got into Siem Reap at 9pm and our arses were red raw from a combination of hard seats and lots of bumping up and down. We checked into a place that the minibus dropped us off at since at that time of night we couldnt be arsed to look for anywhere else. Plus it was only 4 US for a twin room.
Anyways, more stories when we go to see Angkor Wat tomorrow! |
Locations Visited: Bangkok Metropolis, Poipet, Siem Reap
Add Comment
Comment Policy:
Only signed in members can comment on journal entries. Please sign in now or register if you would like to leave a comment. Comments are sent to the owner of this journal for approval before being made live on the site.