Bangkok - Part 2

After a fairly unsuccessful attempt at sleeping on the coach, we arrived at 5am in Bangkok, just around the corner from Khao San Road. A somewhat more depressing sight at this time, when still dark and feeling like it should be a party atmosphere, only the odd hooker and homeless family on the sides of the streets. Making our way through the city to our previous hotel, we checked in and found ourselves in the room next door to where we’d been previously. After catching up on the sleep we had tried to get on the coach, we set out into the world of Bangkok once more.

We had two jobs. One was sorting out visas for Myanmar, but that couldn’t be done today as it was a Sunday. Our next job was to go to the travel clinic for tropical diseases to try and sort out my potential incurable disease. After Diana had mentioned about rabies, which I hadn’t thought of until that point, I started doing more and more research. A fair amount of googling later and I’d managed to convince myself it should be fine, however, for the sake of going to a hospital and getting their opinion, it seemed like a good trade off compared to dying a horrible and entirely preventable death. Only, that was also closed on a Sunday. Seems we’d picked the wrong day to get here. We wracked our brains to work out what to do instead.

After a quick pad thai, Diana had read that a weekend market takes place in Bangkok called Chatuchak. Unbelievable, something we may be able to do on a Sunday! We asked the waiter for the best way to get there by bus and were advised exactly where to go and stand, he even drew a little map on a napkin for us.

On the way to the bus, we stopped by an opticians as I’d previously managed to sit on and break my only pair of glasses and was reliant on my contact lenses. The most polite people I have ever met greeted us, one of which speaking fairly good English, and handed us orange juice. Take note shops in England! After going through all the options, which every time I looked even slightly unhappy about they acted like I’d been heavily insulted and tried to lower the price or come up with other options, they took my glasses to put into new frames and we went on to where our little map said the bus would come from,

We hopped on the bus, something extortionate like 50p for both of us, and within half an hour we were in a bustling market place. A huge area, with a stall for almost everything you can think of. Unfortunately, this is in South East Asia, so this included animals which looked less than happy. It seems you can even buy a pet meerkat here and I’m not sure if they were attempting to clean the cage or separate them for another reason, but the remaining meerkat was visibly distressed, with an onlooking meerkat in a nearby cage also distressed that it couldn’t help.

The latest in doggy fashion

Having managing to top up on various items of clothing and some new pairs of sunglasses, we headed back on the bus which dropped us off right outside the opticians, which was handy as they were ready for collection and looked good as new. Another round of gratuitous behavior and we headed out for dinner and to look around Khao San road for a new bag for Diana, as she’d spotted various sellers of them dotted around in the style she liked and her bag was now falling apart in every conceivable way. Miraculously, we managed to find one in almost no time at all and concluded for the night. At least, I did, Diana didn’t manage to get much sleep due to the sheer heat of the room. We also managed to go to bed a lot later than we had planned as we were formulating a route and itinerary of what to do in Myanmar, and had to be up at the crack of dawn in order to go sort out of visa. Diana also had a distraction of suitable monsoon-y proportions preventing her from getting any shut-eye.

The following morning it was still raining very heavily. Having had only around 3-4 hours sleep, I was barely functioning, Diana was just as bad, and we had no idea if there would be any issue with the boats running the way the weather currently was. Adorning our rain jackets and putting a waterproof cover over my new rucksack I’d purchased at the market the previous day (My rucksack managed to split after buying it brand new a couple of weeks before we left, not impressive in the slightest), we venture out for a 10 minute walk to the nearest pier. We needed to get to the central pier, so any boat going the right direction would do, and fortunately the boats were still running. We jumped aboard and had a refreshing, if not incredibly sleepy, boat journey.

Finding the embassy wasn’t much of an issue. One road, pretty much, from the dock, and around a corner, and we saw the entrance. We had been warned to get there early, as when the doors open you are issued a queue number and there is only a 2 hour window to apply for a visa per weekday, so it can get pretty busy. When we arrived, two people were queueing up and we had about an hour before the door opened. We joined the line, where someone advised there was a ‘mobile office’ just up the road where we could get forms. The mobile office was nothing more than a small white van with a printer and various stationary in it, as well as a Thai lady with a digital camera in case we needed some passport photos printed up. Fortunately, we were prepared enough that we only needed a form, and I managed to fill mine out (under the shelter of a nearby office building) before the doors had opened.

We sat down at the desks, typical college style things with a little fold away table on it. Very boring room, three windows at the end with a number above each. We waited until they started calling out the numbers, whilst putting the finishing touches on our forms. The whole process was incredibly painless, and it did turn out beneficial we had turned up early as it wasn’t long before the room was packed with at least 50 people. The only issue we encountered was at the desk, upon reading our ‘occupation’ answers, mine IT and Diana’s Occupational Therapist, we were both received with blank looks. I was asked who I worked for. I told him I had no job, he didn’t seem happy about that and asked if I was in university. No, unemployed. Nothing. Nada. He looked at me again, and asked if I worked in a private company. Wanting to move on from this, I said yes, and he ticked it. I’m not sure what benefit this had, but he was happier. Diana had to explain she worked for the NHS, which he thought was an NGO. Eventually, they were happy with it though, and we progressed with our day, one passport lighter.

A friendly street lizard!

Next stop, hospital. I’ll go into more detail in a later blog post about all of our hospital visits, as these are all fairly interesting in themselves, however I will say that it didn’t go entirely to plan, it cost us a fair amount more than we wanted to spend on being injected (although nothing astronomical) and would involve a further hospital trip the next morning to a different place.

Finally, I’d heard that not far from where we were was a large shopping mall, with many levels and various different shops on each. A lot larger than I expected, we ended up getting horribly lost for a while, not really buying much but with plenty to look around. On one of the floors, a huge electronics maze existed, where almost every stall sold exactly the same range of knock off smart phones, selfie sticks, speakers and other flashy items, which was fine, except there were hundreds of them around the room and it was incredibly disorientating, to the point we could barely find out how to get out of the building again. We did discover an amazing sweet treat though, a very thin, crispy pancake with a liquid meringue style filling. Extremely sweet, probably 120% sugar, but amazing.

After eventually navigating out way out of there, we headed towards the bus stop. About 3 buses were on the route we wanted back to Khao San Road. After around 50 minutes of waiting and every bus except our one turning up, we went to a nearby food stall and had dinner, deciding to just walk the route and hope the bus would pass by us. Unfortunately for us, we watched one of the buses we wanted disappear down the road, just missing it, and unsure if another would come by, we started weighing up our options for getting back. After trying to negotiate a motorcycle taxi, who wanted to charge us considerably more than we wanted to pay, we were starting to wonder if we’d even make it back. We found another bus stop, advertising the bus route 2 which was one of the ones we wanted and had missed, and stuck it out. Luckily, one arrived and we made it back safe and sound, to our now air-conditioned room, as Diana was sick of feeling too hot in the night and stumped up the extra £2.

The next morning, we head to the other hospital, opposite the one we’d been to the previous day, to try and get this resolved. Again, I have loads to write on this, so I’ll save it for another blog post, but this time everything went a lot smoother (although we had to be at the embassy for 3pm so a lot of clock watching occurred). As it was getting on in the day, we took a taxi straight to the Myanmar embassy, collected our passports with no fuss and did a little victory dance.

Heading back towards our hotel, Diana wanted to try a Thai massage, and apparently I had no choice in the matter. An interesting experience, where a tiny Thai lady effectively turned us into accordions. A cross between a masseuse and a chiropractor, it was a somewhat relaxing experience, crossed with a small degree of terror as to whether I’d be leaving with any dislocated joints. Either way, it was definitely an experience and if you have a decent pain tolerance I’m sure it can be relaxing. Diana definitely enjoyed it anyway!

The following day, we headed to Kanchanaburi, site of the bridge over the river Kwai. A fairly simple task, which would involve us taking a bus to the southern bus station, impeded by the fact that none of the three buses we needed arrived after 45 minutes of waiting. Actually, two of them did, but both said they weren’t going to the bus station for some reason. A Thai man who was selling items on a nearby stall and clearly saw we were struggling advised we went around the corner to another bus stand and got a different number. Typically, as we walked up to this location, we watched as the bus we needed drove past us, stopped to pick up others and drove into the distance. Somewhat put out, we headed to the other bus stand to await the other bus, seeing one leaving just as we arrived. Figuring we knew we were at least in the right spot, we waited for another 30 minutes with no sign of a bus. Giving up at this point, we hailed a taxi and decided to do it the easy way. Typically, no sooner had we turned the corner in the taxi, our bus we wanted was coming the other way. We decided this may not be our luckiest morning.

We arrived at the southern bus terminal and headed to the kiosks to buy a ticket. After being redirected to other booths twice, and figuring this was our bus luck continuing from earlier, we were starting to get a bit frustrated. Finally, a woman told us we had to go downstairs to where the buses leave, platform 10 (actually her exact wording was ‘GOTTA GET DOOOOWWN’, whilst making a somewhat gangster hand gesture, which was odd coming from a middle aged Thai lady). We headed to the platform, bought our tickets and stocked up on snacks, ready for a couple of hours bus journey.