Arrivals and departures

20 November 2017
Quite near Bangkok airport
Raining, 32c

Today we finally left Bangkok, having settled quite nicely into the Orchid Hotel 153 for 5 nights a beautiful old Thai building on the outskirts of the Koh San Rd area of Bangkok. Our flight from Athens, via Istanbul, was uneventful, apart from the inordinate amount of time it took to check the bikes in.  Something to do with a printer not working.

These days we like to settle in to a place, take our time to familiarise ourselves with the new currency etc, and get over the inevitable jet lag.  Despite having been to Thailand many times before the sensory overload never ceases to amaze.  It’s hectic, but for the most part polite.  The smells include a combination of foods, incense, sewers, heady flowers like Jasmine and, my favourite, Frangipani and music mixed in with car horns, drumming and bell ringing from the temples.  We love it.


After 3 days of wandering around the Koh San Road area, eating lovely Thai food, drinking freshly made fruit juices and generally relaxing and sleeping when we needed to, along comes Claire from Saigon.  Claire was on holiday and decided, at the last minute, to hop on a flight from HCM to BKK to spend the weekend with us.  What a joy, we hadn’t seen each other for almost 6 months, so talk, talk, talk we must.  While Dave put the bikes back together Claire and I took a jaunt on the river, a very cool, literally, way to see Bangkok and visited the Taling Chan floating market where we ate the most wonderful prawns and mussel fritters, drank passion fruit juice and had a massage that I will not forget in a long time.  I still feel bruised, but I’m sure it will have done me good!  This morning we waved goodbye, Claire setting off on her journey back to Blighty and us towards the Hat Lek border and Cambodia.

The lovely Claire

Lotus Flowers (I think)

Beautifully presented food at Taling Chan floating market

A box of sweet and savoury pancakes

Traffic-wise, Bangkok is horrendous and the city is now huge, so plod we must.  The road we are taking towards Chon buri is an industrial corridor, full of household names like Toyota, Honda, Komatsu and Nissan, so even though we have left the madness of Bangkok behind 54 kms on it’s still incredibly busy.  The trouble with getting out of cities like Bangkok is the time it takes, but there’s nothing to be done other than just plod.  We stopped for lunch at a stall along the way and both had noodles with pork.  I had forgotten that stalls supply drinking water, you help yourself to a glass, or in this case a plastic cup, and ice from a bucket.  In the UK we might have salt and pepper, HP and Tomato sauce on the table, in Thailand there are chilli flakes, chilli paste, peanuts, sugar and chilli oil.  Our lovely lunch, with a mango shake and fresh coconut juice, cost the grand total of 150 baht (about £3).

Thousands of schoolchildren, a big event at the Grand Palace

Fixing boat engines in Bangkok

Lunch

When it stops raining we will head out to try and buy some bread to go with our peanut butter (trying to buy bread that isn’t packed with sugar is a challenge) and milk for our porridge, acquired at the Tesco Lotus in Bangkok.  That’ll be breakfast and lunch for tomorrow.

I hear it’s cold and wet in the UK.  Still, it’s nearly Christmas!

Laters