Once we realised how much Stable lodge was really costing us, we upgraded our accommodation for the four nights we had in Bangkok. We booked a serviced apartment at Citiadines in Sukhumvit 8, just down the road from Stable Lodge.

Messy bed at Citadines

We booked it on Wotif and it cost us a little bit more than what Stable Lodge was. It was totally worth it for the comfortable bed alone, especially after sleeping on really hard and really soft beds at the other places.

Nice TV at Citadines

Somehow we ended up wth four nights in Bangkok with was way too much. If you’re going to Thailand, only spend a few days in Bangers at a maximum. It’s just not that exciting. It’s too similar to Melbourne really. Trains, shopping centers, etc.

We checked out the massive MBK shopping center and the King Power duty free place too. If you see King Power anywhere.. avoid it. Don’t waste your time, it’s fancy stuff that is way overpriced.

The last night in Bangkok, we found out about the semi-permanent beer gardens that get set up outside the CentralWorld shopping center. The beer garden for the Thai beer Singha, must have had some association with the Japanese beer Asahi, which just happens to be my favourite beer. So, you can imagine my excitement to find out they were serving it there.

The Asahi tower

Bek and I polished off a tower of Asahi. The tower is a 3 litre tube full of beer with a column of ice down the middle to keep it cold and a tap on the bottom to pour. It was awesome. I thought about how good it would be to do a similar thing in Melbourne, but I realised that it just wouldn’t work because it would get abused. People would be getting smashed and then smashing each other (like going to any pub in the city these days). The Thai people don’t drink that much and are very passive. It’s nice to walk around at any time and feel totally safe.

All gone

We had trouble getting a taxi to the airport when it was time to leave. The guy at the hotel mentioned something about a bomb, but we didn’t know anything else. Finally a taxi arrived who was willing to take us. This guy was crazy. He had this strange twitch in his seat while he was driving. He was doing 130 km/h down the freeway, which had 80 signs. Weaving through traffic and flashing his lights at anyone slowing him down. We also didn’t have any seat belts.

Closer to the airport, we started seeing lots of people in yellow shirts with plastic hand clappers. I had no idea who they were until later. They were protesters heading towards the airport to shut it down.

Protester convoy

We managed to get most of the way to the airport before traffic stopped moving. Bek and I had to put our backpacks on and walk the last km to the terminal. It was pretty exciting actually. We were so lucky to get our fight, because not long after, the protesters stormed the terminal and all flights got shut down. It must have been only an hour or two after we left.

Their aim was to stop their prime minister from getting into the country, from Peru where the APEC summit was held. It seems they don’t like him very much… and it’s a long story.

A nine hour flight and we touched down in Melbourne. First stop, the Classic Curry Company

All the photos have been uploaded to my Google Picasa account.

We were planning on catching the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, but at the train station, they said they didn’t have any first class tickets available, so we flew instead. This meant waiting at the airport in Bangkok for a few hours, but it meant we got to Chiang Mai much sooner.

Bek had found a rave review of a boutique hotel from The Age which sounded pretty good. The place was called Banilah and it’s in the north-west part of the city.

Bek standing outside Banilah

This worked out well, because most of the westerners stayed on the east side of the city, so I think we got more of a feel for what Chiang Mai is really about. The young ladies who run the hotel were awesome. They gave us a map when we got there and hilighted lots of things on it we should look at. I also asked them about a good restaurant to eat at for Thai food. If you’re in Chiang Mai, you have to eat at Cafe de Nimman. It was awesome.

We did lots of walking around in Chiang Mai. Bek had an upset stomach, so we had to tone it down a little, but we managed to see lots of the city.

The Tanin fresh food market

The funny thing about the people in Thailand is that they don’t walk anywhere. We occasionally found it difficult to get around because there were so many motorbikes zooming around and the lack of footpaths. Shop owners often put their wares right to the road side, so it doesn’t leave much room for walking. Also, to add to this, stopping for red lights at pedestrian crossings seems to be optional. It does make life interesting.

Busy Chiang Mai road

If you go to Chiang Mai and you want to get around, here’s a tip. Some blue tuk-tuks have an affiliation with the TAT and will drive you for an hour for 30 baht. I think they may operate during the day only, but I’m not sure. You always ask before you get in anyway.

Look out for the blue tuk-tuk’s

Crusing around in a tuk-tuk is a lot of fun. I could have just paid a guy 200 baht to just drive me around all day.

Riding around in a tuk-tuk

After five nights, we got ourselves a tuk-tuk to the airport to fly to Bangkok again for the final part of our trip.

Got a taxi from Stable Lodge to Bangkok airport early in the morning to fly to Surat Thani. Surat Thani airport reminds me a lot of Avalon Airport. Pretty small and smells funny. Once we grabbed our bags, there was a guy selling tickets to Ko Samui. Perfect.

Air Asia plane at Surat Thani

We jumped on the bus and it took us to the Sea Trans ferry at Don Sak. We got off the bus and onto the ferry for about and hour and a half. Once we arrived at Na Thon port at Ko Samui, we got our bags off the bus and got a mini bus to the bungalow, except the guy must have mistaken me, and dropped us off at the Beach House, not Beer’s House. Simple mistake. Once we worked out where we were, we jumped on a ute with a roof, which finally got us to Beer’s house.

Beer’s house was awesome. We had a bungalow right on the beach. For the few days we were staying in Ko Samui, the weather held out. Just before and just after, Ko Samui had rain and thunderstorms, so we were pretty lucky.

Beer’s House Beach-front bungalow

Ko Samui is an interesting place. Like the rest of Thailand, the roads are full of motorbikes, doing crazy stuff. We did lots of walking around, but mainly around the Lamai beach area which is on the west side of the island. The way the trip worked out, we only stayed there a few days. I could have easily spent much more time there.

Sunday morning we left early to make our way up to Chiang Mai. We organised our trip to the Surat Thani airport with a travel agency, which might have cost us a little more, but it did make it easy. Although Bek and I had this feeling that something would go wrong and we’d miss our flight, it seemed to work out fine in the end.

A mini-bus picked us up at 6:30am from Beer’s House and took us to Na Thon port.
We were told to get on a bus at Na Thon port, which was crammed full. People were standing in the aisle. Nobody had any idea what was going on, we just were fed small bits of english which gave us an uncomfortable feeling.

We took the bus 15 minutes to the Raja Ferry pier. Bek had read lots of bad things about the Raja ferry, so when she saw the sign, she began to get really nervous. Not to mention she also gets sea sick. She’d heard stories about the ferries running aground and other dodgy acts.

Boarding the Raja ferry

We were told to get off the bus, and get onto the ferry. We were also told to leave our bags on there, which made us a little nervous. The ferry ride was fine, so that was a relief. We got back on the bus at Don Sak and travelled about an hour to the town of Surat Thani.

In the middle of nowhere, we had to get off the bus and get into a different one. We when traveled a bit further and had to get out again. This time it was a little shed, which was some sort of bus terminal. We got in a mini-van with a few other people from there on our way to Surat Thani airport.

Meanwhile, I had brought my Nokia Internet Tablet with me and my external GPS. I had pre-downloaded all the Google Maps tiles so I could track where we were going. It was really handy, because we got lost a couple of times. I was following where the guy was taking us for a while, and he was going in a totally different direction to the airport. I was getting a bit nervous, but he eventually turned the van around. He was taking a short-cut

One interesting moment was when we were overtaking a truck. We weren’t going that fast and there was a car coming towards us in the other direction but it seems there was time for another car to overtake us at the same time. Thailand drivers are nuts.

We checked in to our Air Asia flight with plenty of time. We flew from Surat Thani to Bangkok airport but had to wait 5 and a half hours to then board another Air Asia flight to Chiang Mai.

As you may have heard, protests have been going on in Bangkok recently. It seems to be about the Thai people wanting their prime minister to resign.

We finally got a taxi from our hotel to the airport, after many taxi’s refused to take us. The guy who did end up taking us was a bit crazy, and he was going 130 km/h down the 80 km/h freeway and our seatbelts didn’t work.

Protesters were stopping traffic a few kilometers from the airport. Traffic was crawling from there towards the airport, with people wearing yellow shirts yelling a going crazy.

We managed to almost make it all the way to the airport, but we had to get our and walk the last bit, which wasn’t too bad. News says that the airport was closed shortly after, so we were probably lucky.

The Age has an article: Protesters storm Bangkok airport which might give some insight about what is going on in Bangkok right now.

I’ve got more to write about our holiday, but that might have to come tomorrow.

Bek and I managed to score some really cheap JetStar flights to Bangkok six months ago in a 2 for 1 deal. In the end we paid about $400 each for our return tickets, so we’ve had six months to look forward to this trip.

The flight was about normal. It started with JetStar being late to open bag check-in and delays before boarding the flight. During the flight we had the token screaming baby and annoying Americans behind us, not to mention, the in-flight entertainment system was broken. I think this is probably deliberate, to get more people to hire their Video-on-demand systems which cost extra. I came fully prepared with an iPod loaded with new movies which helped a little with the 9 hour flight.

The first thing you notice in Thailand is the humidity as soon as you get out of the airport. It wasn’t overpowering, probably because it was 8pm and a coolish day, by Bangkok’s standards. Bek had done her research, and knew exactly what we needed to do once we got off the plane. We had to find the proper airport taxi queue to avoid being taken for a ride (bad pun alert!). The freeways are pretty smooth and the tollways quick. Lanes and indicators are optional, as well as doing the speed limit. Makes for good fun.

We got the taxi to our hotel, just off Sukhumvit Rd, which was about 30 minutes in the taxi from the airport. The streets that run off Sukhumvit Rd are called Soi’s. We’re staying on Soi 8. It looks more like a laneway than a street, and there is plenty going on, all the time. We’ve actually got two 7-eleven’s on ours, which has been handy changing our large 1000 THB notes to something more manageable.

Sukhumvit Road, Soi 8

We’re staying at Stable Lodge. It has free wifi (which lots of places have here) which is nice. It’s meant that we could book our flights and do some research without having to leave the place. I also put in a call home to let the parentals know we’re still alive. The Eee PC is awesome btw.

Stable Lodge restaurant and pool area

We caught the Skytrain today into the city and exchanged some money and had a walk around the big shopping centers. MBK is the largest. It’s massive. It’s a shame that the prices are too similar to what we’re used to in Australian dollars, but that’s probably more just because I’ve been looking at the gadgets.

The tuk-tuk drivers are seriously pissing me off though. Everywhere you go, there they are waiting to harass you to make you go for a ride with them. They’d probably just take you to their mates jewelery shop. We also had a few incidents at the train station. The ‘official’ information people aren’t official. Even with their fake ID badges.

Busy Bangkok motorway

We bought a couple of long-necks of Chang beer from 7-eleven, which were a bargain at 35 THB and we’re having an early night. It’s up early tomorrow morning to catch our flight to Surat Thani. We go by ferry from there to our next destination.. Beer’s house at Ko Samui. It’s going to be rad.. as long as the weather stays ok.

Bangkok skyline, from our balcony