After a somewhat sleepless night, we got on a plane heading for Sydney to eventually catch a flight to Bangkok, Thailand. Due to some "outsourcing" issues between Qantas, British Airways and the seat allocation company (?!?) we were under the impression that we were to be separated on the Bangkok flight but after a bit of persistence we got on the plane and ended up with 4 seats to ourselves, which was a nice start to our holiday.
Getting off the plane in Bangkok is an experience in itself. The heat, humidity and asphyxiating smog hits hard and almost knocks you out although it was 11 o'clock at night. The experience reminded me of stepping of the plane in Brisbane 6 years ago, coming from winter in Sweden to summer in Australia (except the smog part). We got ripped of catching a fixed price taxi to our hotel for 800 baht (about 30 AUD for 45 minute ride), not that we really cared after a 9 hour plane trip.
Bangkok's skyline is a contrast of very old, dirty and run-down buildings in-between the new, "clean" and modern high-rises. The massive high-ways are always packed and traffic appears chaotic to Westerners. Despite traffic being very heavy and cars, moped and tuk-tuks (3-wheeled golf buggy driven by people with a permanent death wish) are zooming in and out of lanes, few vehicles seems dented or scratched and road-rage is non-exist ant. People just do their "thing".. Fascinating and scary at the same time.
Our hotel - The Indra Regent (my mothers namesake) is located walking distance to the market district and more importantly close to the largest IT Mall in Thailand, an IT-nerds paradise (as Belinda so eloquently puts it). Six floors of hardware, software(pirated), music (pirated) and anything related to computers. The hardware was from what I could work out not a lot cheaper than what we usually pay (but I could be wrong about this).
We took a City and Temple tour, visiting the lot of Buddhas: The Golden Buddha, The Recling Buddha, Sitting, Walking, Standing Buddhas and just every other Buddha known to man. Shame we're not Buddhists.. After a few they all pretty much all look the same.. Most impressive was the Reclining Buddha, it's 15 meter high and 46 meters long. We also got dropped at the Gem Gallery (The largest in the world) were we where put though some hard-selling for everything that we looked at. The jewellery is all handcrafted and very exquisite and cheap (comparably??).
Random cats and dogs seems to appear everywhere in Bangkok, they tend to just sleep all the time. We also got lost on the back streets of the shopping district and took a Tuk-Tuk back to the hotel. Even though we were about 2 blocks away (or so), the driver took us a circle around the district, through alleyways, back-streets, markets and probably backyards. It was pretty exciting considering we had a fixed price of 100 baht. He probably would have done it for 10 but we didn't see the need to argue.
Links to Gallery
Next day we flew to Koh Samui.
