Bangkok ... Suits and more Suits!

The Bangkok airlines flight to from Siem Reap was surprisingly fast and awesome (for Ewa who still doesn’t like flying). It took about 35min and they served breakfast for free! What a nice change after Europe where you have to buy everything on the flight. We got a taxi and checked into our hotel. The first thing on our list was to see Mr. Sam, a tailor that Dave recommended. Since we were only going to be in Bangkok for 5 days we figured it gave us just enough time to decide on some grown up clothes and have them ready to ship the day before we left. We were staying right off Koh San Road on Rambuttri and his shop was close by so that made it easier to get around.

The finished suits

The first thing we noticed is that the city is busy, crazy, loud and fun if you don’t get annoyed by the tourist scene. Anything you need is just around the corner for a price of course. For some reason Bangkok has also been invaded by 7-11’s, there is one every few hundred meters, which is good in case you get thirsty and you don’t want a juice in a plastic bag with a straw, although it does look fun. We spent close to 4 hours at Mr. Sams picking out styles and fabrics and getting fitted, that left enough time to check out more of our area of town and have dinner. On the second day we went to Mr. Sams again to get fitted (this became an every day ritual) and hit Kho San Road to check out the scene, it gets pretty rowdy at night. The road is filled with touristy shops, restaurants and street vendors. Oh, and thousands of dumb-struck tourists. We also decided that it was high time for us to get a haircut. This was Ewa’s first haircut since starting the trip, six months ago. It gets hotter every time we go further south and the long hair is becoming frustrating, but not to worry only about 2-3 inches got cut, she is not sporting a bald head…yet. That night we had a great dinner on one of the street restaurants that open up at night. This one was a BBQ one and they cook your fish or meat on a makeshift BBQ. While waiting for our dinner the usual vendors came around selling anything and everything. One really cute little girl had a bunch of roses to sell. She was maybe 5 or 6 years old and as soon as she came up to the table she said: You buy! And we said No thanks. She then preceded to sit down on Chads chair right beside him took one of our pens and started doodling in our planning book. She sat and talked to us for at least ten minutes totally content with the doodling, she drew us and said : You poppa and you mamma. Too cute! How were we not going to buy a flower from her? We even haggled with her for fun and got a 5 baht discount (0.17 on 1.33).

Food vendor dishin up some great Pad Thai

The following day was a mad rush. We wanted to buy underwater housing for our digital camera so that we could take pictures when we go diving. Our camera is only good for 10m depth and we’re never at ten meters for a whole dive. We took a taxi to downtown Bangkok where there are huge shopping malls. We pretty much ran around for about 8 hours from one place to the next trying to find this housing and a few other items and had no luck. Exhausted and hurried to make it to Mr. Sams for another fitting we jumped in a cab. We told the cab driver where we wanted to go and he said we must be crazy because it was peak traffic and it would take at least an hour to get there. Why not hang around here for an hour and a half and have some dinner and I will pick you up later and take you then. He even said he would call our tailor to let him know we would be late. Red Flags we‘ve now learned: 1. If someone is trying to change your destination, this is probably not a good thing 2. People go out of their way to ‘Help’ you are not trying to help you most of the time, they are trying to screw you 3. We have to learn to say No and not feel bad about it, we seem to have a problem with doing this 4. If something seems fishy it is perfectly ok to bail from anywhere at anytime. So we succumbed to the trap and had our supper at a very shady restaurant that looked like it was falling apart, all of the food was ghastly overpriced and to add to it, it wasn’t even good. We ordered a curry crab, but dumb of us we didn’t watch them weigh it. They charged us an insane amount of money for dinner, about 10 times the amount we should have paid. We learned our lesson, oh did we ever. We didn’t bother to stick around for the taxi driver who most likely wouldn’t come back anyway since he made his commission from the restaurant to bring us there and caught a cab to Mr. Sams, now almost 2 hours late. We were there getting fitted until 10:30 and were exhausted by the end of the night.

Chad posing with the warriors

The next day it was raining all day so we spent the day relaxing, Chad got a Thai massage and Ewa got her nails done, it was a nice treat. Since we hadn’t yet seen anything cultural we decided to check out The Grand Palace and Wat Po. We left quite early in the morning and were almost derailed at our first stop Wat Po because we were just about to go in when a random “helpful” person came up running to us to tell us that we can’t go in to the Wat because we weren’t dressed properly, as we learned our lesson just a few days before we said thanks and walked in anyway. When we got there we had no problem, Ewa was given a scarf to put around her shoulders and that was it. Wat Po is a beautiful temple that has a giant gold lying Buddha inside. It is probably close to 15m long and 4 meters high. It is beautiful. You can explore the Wat which is huge at your own pace, we walked around for close to an hour looking at all of the different statues and temples. Everything is decorated with jewels and gold, amazing. It was starting to get extremely hot and it wasn’t even 10:30 in the morning yet. We left the Wat with only one more destination the Grand Palace. The palace is the official residence of the Kings of Thailand since the 18th century. We arrived and noticed that you needed to be appropriately dressed, but this was a bit more extreme. They had a building right next to the entrance that you had to borrow clothes from, traditional thai clothes. Like it wasn’t hot enough, we were now wearing long clothes, Ewa was in a skirt down to the floor and a purple stuffy shirt and Chad had to wear long pants, over his shorts. Ewa almost had heat stroke that day, it was so hot and you couldn’t drink enough water. The Grand Palace is really amazing to see. Jewels, gold leaf, and intricate decorations everywhere. This is really the first ‘modern’ Asian palace we have visited and we were overwhelmed with the architecture and decoration. There were quite a few tourists and the heat wasn’t helping so as much as we appreciated the palace we were only there for a few hours before we made it back to our hotel to rest. We checked out the pool on the roof for a while but even in the pool the heat was too much.

Giant reclining Buddha

On our last day, we boxed up all of our goodies, entrusted them with the Thai mail system and sent them on their way to Canada. With our goods in the mail, we were off to the airport the next morning for our flight to Ko Tao - Turtle island! Some of the other tourist traps that are used really play on a typical Western idea of people actually trying to help you out. You will be approached with people looking to ‘genuinely’ give you some advice about how to get around and what to see and do. Of course they will probably tell you some place to go that you hadn’t planned, but sounds nice. What follows is always a series of detours, overpriced transportation, food, entry fees, or other red tape that costs a lot of money. As horrible as it sounds, unless you really get to know one of the locals, don’t listen to their ‘advice’ at all. Listen to the tips from other tourists, and your own instincts. You’ll fare much better. Oh, and there is NO Buddha day in Bangkok or elsewhere in Thailand. However, despite the tourist traps, the vendors in Bangkok seem to be a lot more relaxed that those that we have run into in Cambodia, Vietnam and China. We saw a lot of vendors selling wooden ‘frogs’ that make a real-life frog like sound when you rub a stick across their back, we saw vendors even selling tasers, switch blades, throwing stars and knifes right on the side of the road. Oh, and in Khoa San road, you can buy just about any license or diploma that you can imagine. Wanna have a pilot’s certification? 1500 baht, no problem.

Flight with Bangkok airways! They rock!

written by

ECRadventure on November 10, 2009 from Bangkok, Thailand

from the travel blog: ECRadventure's Travel Blog

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ewa, chad...
reading your Bangkok log with lots of empathy. did not like my last two days there at all. most of all and despite all your warnings plus my travel guide warnings - I DID get trapped by scumbags in front of the kings palace due to some kind of 'bhudda celebration' and hopped onto an old mans tuk tuk, wanting to drive me to different places and-suprise- to a thai market. two corners later my mind finally made kilck and I forced the driver to go back. he howled and screamed (for sure he was facing to loose his free gasoline coupon), but I screamed more and got off. of course I had to pay another expensive tuk tuk to go back to the next skytrain station. Anyhow. Rest of the vacation was awsome. and most of all I liked the days at coral view, meeting you guys was supergood and will keep it a special memory. will be so interesting to read what's on your schedule next. cheers and all the best from (back in) Hamburg, hannah

written by Hannah on November 29, 2009

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