No worries in Bangkok

Since the last post, we got another 15-day visa without a hitch, and we crept our way up the east coast, staying on beaches along the way.

It was pretty interesting to do a visa run to Myanmar. The Thai government knows why all the tourists go to Ranong. When they stamp your passport to leave Thailand, they give you a new arrival card. We took a long boat with some Brits to Myanmar and we were there for about 15 minutes. It cost us 10USD each and two big stamps in our passport (stamp space is precious when you’re travelling for 10 months straight!) and then straight back to the other side...Uneventful really. We checked out the hot springs outside Ranong afterwards and MC was super happy to see an elephant in the parking lot. He was on his lunch break from giving people rides. When he saw us, he came straight to me and he tried to touch me with his trunk! It was quite weird, but it made sense afterwards when we noticed that people can buy elephant snacks and feed it to the elephant.

We drove up to Chumpon on the east coast, and stayed near the national park along the coast. Near- not in, it would of coast us 200 bhat each to camp overnight, 5 times the price because we are foreigner, of course. It’s all official too!

29 January 2009

Next day was more driving towards Bangkok, and we stayed the night at beach near Hua Hin. Hua Hin is over developed and crowded!

The next day, it took us a while to negotiate the Bangkok traffic, which wasn’t that bad, but making a U-turn in that city is a nightmare! Someone had told us that we could camp out in Lumphini park, which turned out to be wrong, since they shut the gates at night and everybody had to be out. We went into Chinatown, thinking that we would find cheap accomodation. After parking the car, we got in contact with Gaultier, who is now living a real life with a real job in Bangkok (maybe we should get one of those soon?), and he offered for us to stay over at his place. Amazing!

After a shower, a couple of beers, and dinner, all the lost time was caught up, and Gaultier filled us in on what he knew of Thai culture, as we talked about our trip and experiences so far. After that, Gaultier slept in the guest cot and left us his double bed. What a host!

So far, Bangkok is good to us!

JD