Bangkok - Day 3

Our third day in Bangkok was a national holiday, so entrance to the Grand Palace was free! Though we had to let the King go first. Seemed like a fair trade.

The Grand palace complex is home to the Emerald Buddha, which is carved out of Jade, just to confuse you. Anyway, it's carved from a single piece of Jade, and having seen the huge reclining Buddha the day before I was expecting something pretty spectacular from the even more famous Emerald one. It was mildly disappointing, but sadly, because you can't take photos in the room, I do not have much evidence of this with which to convince you. It's about 45cm tall and, though it may well be a beautiful Jade statue, it's covered in different gold outfits most of th year and surrounded by much taller, much gaudier gold Buddhas that really distract from it.

In the afternoon we went to Chatachuk market, which was awesome. Everything you could think of was for sale. The food was great, lots of fresh cooked stuff that took just a couple of minutes to prepare before you were off on your way again. My favourite was the happy buns, which are little dumplings stuffed with meat or seafood that have smiley faces on them.

Top Tip

If you park your car at a shopping mall in Bangkok during a national holiday, leave the handbrake off:

Phuket Photos

In the home stretch now with the holiday photos. Just to confuse everybody I'm posting these before Bangkok Day 3, because I thought I'd posted that already but just realised I haven't even created the slideshow. Our last leg of the trip was to the island of Phuket, these are photos from Kata Noi, where our hotel was, and from the town of Kata itself. Enjoy.

Bangkok - Day 2

What can you do after an evening in a red light district, except head for a temple? Nikki and I took the Skytrain and the MRT to the river before catching a river taxi to Wat Pho. Since there are two slideshows here I've turned autoplay off, (which I think is a new option, that I will default to from now on).

Pictures from the river:



Pictures from Wat Pho:

Bangkok - Day 1

As any good tourist does, Nikki and I immediately headed for one of Bangkok's red light districts, in our case Soi Cowboy. Our strategy was to plant ourselves in a strategic position, buy a couple of beers and watch the world go by. This worked incredibly well. After a few Singha's we decided to order food. A process that involved our waitress running off to a street vendor to grab a menu which we ordered from, she ran back and then the street vendor came back and delivered our food personally. It was more food than we could possibly finish and it all tasted fantastic. A fine way to spend an evening.