"Bangkok" a Bangkok Travel Page by Openseas

After a long trip from Helsinki we landed at Bangkok at 2.30pm, and took a taxi to our hotel the Shangri-la (room 1919) situated on the Chao Phraya River. Our room was large and beautiful overlooking the busy river with barge boats, ferries and large carriers all hassling for room on the already polluted river. The view is very similar to the hotels we stayed in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

After checking in, we had showers and then ventured to find Pat pong markets a busy, dirty, sweaty, expensive market with lots of fake merchandise and designer goods. The Thai’s are certainly different to the experience we have had with the Chinese, we found the Thai’s to be easily offended if challenged over a price. At least the Chinese have a sense of humour, which is very entertaining to any visitor.

We spend a few hours just wandering around looking at the stalls, which were overshadowed, by the Thai brothels and seedy bars. The sex industry’s annual turnover in Thailand is nearly double the Thai government’s annual budget, so the industry is very powerful and creates huge problems for the Thai government to control. Most Thai women have worked in a bar or brothel sometime in their lives, which I find to be sad for the country as the overall oriental experience, is massacred by the smell of sex being offered at every corner.

In the evening, we walked back to our hotel and had dinner, which was fabulous as the restaurant, overlooked the river and had Thai traditional dancers entertaining us throughout the evening, and the food was excellent with a fabulous selection of Thai food.

Sunday 30th

We had a lovely breakfast in our room and then took a long boat to see Wat Phra Kaew and the Grand Palace. When we arrived, we meet a young Scottish couple that were on their honeymoon. We started walking with them to the Grand Palace only to find on arrived the Palace was closed for the day. So somehow, we got hassled into taking a tuk-tuk to see Wat Phra Kaew and what a scam that turned out to be. On the way the driver insisted that he take us to a great shopping spot, which turned out to be a duty free shop, and when we didn’t buy anything they proceeded to get very nasty with us.

A Wat is a Buddhist compound where men and women can be ordained as monks or nuns, the Wat Phra Kaew houses the Emerald Budda carved from jade. We entered into the temple to find monks praying and singing. It was a nice spiritual experience only to be broken afterwards with the Tuk-Tuk drivers once again started hassling us to buy from another shop.

After our little experience with Tuk –Tuk drivers we caught a taxi to the department store in Sitcom road. We walked around for a while before we became bored and hungry and had lunch in a little Thai café, which was very nice. Later, we caught a taxi back to our hotel room and decided to go for a swim and enjoy our hotel away from the heat, infuriating noise, buzzing tuk-tuk’s, pollution, and maddening streets and crowds. We enjoyed ourselves and later had dinner in the hotel before heading of again to try and find the night markets, which turned out to be disappointing, so returning back to the hotel seemed a lovely way to end our stay in Bangkok.

Monday 31st

It was fabulous to wake up late and do nothing but eat breakfast and later had chum cha before packing our bags. We checked out at 3.00pm and caught a taxi to the airport only to find when we boarded the plane we were placed in a three-combination seat with me in the middle. I decided that I could not sit in those seats and asked to be moved and that’s where I stayed for the whole long disastrous trip home arriving in Sydney around 6.30am in the morning.