Backpacking - The arrival in Bangkok good times!
After flying from Shangri La to Kunming on the early flight, a short night and another early flight from Kunming, China we finally arrived in Bangkok on the morning of January 5th to meet up with our mates Tom, Chris and Hans who had arrived a day earlier.
While on the flight from Kunming to Bangkok we got talking to a very nice Chinese girl with surprisingly good English who was on her first trip ever outside China to study further in Bangkok. She was a bit nervous and was supposed to meet a person from the university there to pick her up and had no idea what to do if he would not be there. We decided to go through immigration with her to make sure she was OK and ended up staying in the airport for quite a while to help her find the person that was supposed to be there, but in the end it all worked out.
When we had finally left the airport it immediately struck us how western everything felt and of course how lovely and warm it was after the freezing temperatures in the Himalaya. When we got to the guesthouse we found our mates in deep coma’s due to jet lag and the previous nights drinking. We settled in to our room as they got ready for the day.
Afternoon walk near Khao San Road Bangkok Thailand
Afterwards we went for a wander around the neighborhood and gave them a bit of an introduction to the back alleys and other places they hadn’t seen in the Bang Lamphu neighborhood before, like the hidden mosque and the remarkably tranquil Chana Songkhram temple, which is in the midst of the main tourist areas and around the corner from khoasan road. We ended up having dinner in one of the cheap but excellent cooking school restaurants The flow and went on to have drinks in one of the many street (cocktail) bars where we ended up drinking Long Islands untill late in the evening. And things naturally got pretty messy while scoring disgusting snacks and beers at the seven eleven after closure.
Street bar Banglamphu Bangkok Thailand
The next day we went to show Chris who had come to South East Asia for the first time the shopping craziness of MBK center in the business district (Sukhumvit). Instead of taking a taxi, we decided to take the longer but way more scenic route there using the Express ferry that takes you across the Chao Phraya river to the Thaksin bridge (a scenic boat ride of about 30 mins for about 40 euro cents) from where we took the sky train, an elevated railway which snakes over the road between the sky scrapers of the business district. After this long Journey and a shopping overload we headed back to our area in Banglamphu and headed for the relaxing ambiance of Hemlock restaurant and on to the street cocktail bars again for some Long islands.
MBK Shopping madness Sukhumvit Bangkok Thailand
The next day on the 7th of January, it was time to head for the Archipelago of Koh Chang for some beach side relaxing and island hopping.