12.12.2006

For Bangkok we had only two and a half days but it seemed to be somehow enough for us. Ok, we haven’t seen very much but the city with its high traffic rate and smog does not really motivate to walk around in order to explore it. We stayed in the hostel called atHOME (117 Tanao Road, just 100m away from Khao San Road) which offered very clean rooms with fan for 300Bath. Bangkok is good for making tailored suits and shirts so on the first day we followed the recommendation for a tailor opposite to the national stadium and also tried one in Khao San Road. Near the national stadium are also Bangkoks biggest shopping centers Siam Center, Siam Discovery Center, Siam Paragon, Central World Plaza and Mahboonkrong side by side. In those centers exists a store for every major international brand and you probably would need several days to see everything but the prices for cloths for example seem to be similar to Germany and walking through the centers is not too much fun when you know that you can’t buy the things because you would have to carry them for 5 weeks.

On the second day I visited tha main tourist attractions, the Grand Palace with Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha) as well as Wat Pho which has the largest reclining buddha. We also had to go back to the tailors to do the first fitting. In the evening we went out in Khao San Road. This road is very interesting as it changes completely several times a day. When we arrived at 6am on the first day, the street was completely empty - you wouldn’t have expected that it is an important road. During the day the road, in addition to the opened stores, is full of stalls which sell cloths, bags, shoes and other things. In the late evening then people offer food on the street and the stalls vanish again. We’ve been a bit suprised that in this tourist main street the pubs and clubs all closed at 1am (as normally in Thailand in case the owner does not want to pay the police). So we went to a place a few hundred meters away for playing billard. Today we took the night train to Chiang Mai. It takes 15 hours but as it is a sleeping train and we are quite tired from last night that is no problem.

Bangkok lessons learned:
Somebody approaching you saying “Hello, my friend.” is to 99,99 percent not your friend but somebody that wants to sell something.
The tuk tuk ‘mafia’ is everywhere. If you know where to go and you make a fixed price for a fixed route in advance it’s ok. Otherwise a tuk tuk driver is nothing else than somebody driving you to the places where he gets good commision nomatter whether you agreed in going there or not. And when he realizes that you are not interested in buying he just drops you off somewhere on the way pretending any reason why he cannot continue (The one way streets are difficult for the tuk tuk but Khao San road is just 200m away - yes, of course, tell these stories to your mother next time if you like but not to us. At least we didn’t pay him but we still were a bit angry with ourselves that we did him the favour to go into a silk shop for ten minutes in order that he gets a 5 liter gas coupon and then he still did not drive us to the right place as promised).

Categories: Getting around