Day 1000 – Bangkok, Thailand

Day 1000 – 3rd March 2008 +7:00 GMT

So it has now been a 1000 days since Jill and I first got on that plane and I started my blog. It’s great to be travelling again and it’s great to be in Bangkok. Bangkok seems like a dirty city due to all the smog and pollution, all the people who work in the open wear face masks to protect themselves from breathing in all the fumes. The city is full of brightly coloured taxi’s and battered old buses, thousands of motorbikes and clouds of smog.

The Busy Streets

Brightly Coloured Taxi's

Bangkok

The roads are amazing to watch in our first day we have seen a scooter whizzing by with four people on it and child about 2 in between them another bike zoom pass with 4 gas cylinders balanced on the back. Trucks are crowded full of people and no one seems to wear seatbelts. All the side streets are full of street traders with little stalls and rackety old carts selling the most amazing range of foods and drinks.Every street corner has a massive shopping mall which are enormous some bigger than Bluewater or Lakeside (those in UK will now what I mean) These are immaculately clean and everything is so cheap. And in between all of this there are thousands of small shrines with people praying at them and donating incense, food and drink.

A Shrine

Our Hotel - Siam City Hotel

View From Hotel Room

The first thing we had to do today was to get some passport size photo’s so we could apply for a Vietnamese visa. So we walked a couple of blocks from our hotel to Center One shopping Mall, we had a wander around but no luck with photo’s. So we thought we would get the Skytrain to the centre of the city which is Siam.

The Skytrain

We stopped at a little stall and bought some Waffles and then purchased a 20 trip train ticket. The skytrains are frequent and efficient, nicely air conditioned but very crowded. We only travelled about 4 stops and then had a wander around the side streets before ending up in the Siam Paragon Centre. Here we found a photo shop who took our picture and then we had 30 minutes to wander around before returning to collect them. We then walked for about 45 minutes to the Vietnamese Embassy we joined the queue and after about 10 minutes we handed in our forms and were told to get the visa’s next day we had to pay 2200 baht each. I handed over 5000 baht expecting change and the guy gave me none. I asked for the change and then he changed his mind and decided the Visa’s were going to cost us 2500 baht each. This is apparently quite typical of Embassies in Eastern Asia.It was a little worrying that we had to hand in our passport and come back the next day at 4pm to collect it and Visa’s. So we walked back down the street and visited Central World Plaza Mall.

Outside Central World Plaza

Giant Train Setup In Shopping mall

Here we went to get some food and a beer, only to find you can’t buy alcohol between 2pm – 5pm.
So we got some Curry and a smoothie. The curry is amazing, probably one of the best we ever had. Jill and I both got Curry, Rice and Nans with a Smoothie each for less than five pound. We then caught the train back to the hotel and had a beer in the bar. We then had a little siesta which ended up lasting several hours. When we woke up again we went to the Italian restaurant in the hotel and had some dinner and a few cocktails.

Jill With A Cocktail

We then bought some beer and crisps at the local 7/11 and watched some TV before going to sleep.