Back to city life

Arrived at the airport and caught a Taxi in to Bangkok to our hotel. The taxi was driving at 100km/hr, after the weeks of slow moving transport it felt it was death-defyingly fast!
The hotel is near Khoa San Road - the backpackers haven of Bangkok. We settled in and headed straight out again for food.

March 24
After a restless night - all the backpackers coming home in the early hours slamming doors and making loads of noise - pesky kids! We lazyly left mid-morning for the hustle and bustle of Bangkok. We walked to the Great Palace past tons of wannabe tour guides and Tuk Tuk drivers telling us it was shut - which we ignored thanks to the advice of the lady boy recetionist. When we got to the palace (after walking the whole way round!) we found out it was actually shut because the royal family were there and it wouldn't be open until mid afternoon!
We stopped off at the nearest piece of shade which turned out to be the entrance to the temple with the reclining buddha. This is where we had hoped to walk onto next - saved us a journey! And allowed us a chance to dry off from the huge amount of sweat dripping from us! The Buddha was enormous - it is the largest reclining Gold Buddha in Thailand and is 46m long and 15m high. Plus they have loads of other gold buddhas sat round a temple.

Reclining golden buddha

We headed out to the blazing heeat again for about 15 minutes before spotting an oasis - in the form of an air conditioned cafe! Another chance to cool off.
We got into a Tuk Tuk (after some negotiation on the price) and headed for a massive Shopping centre (as suggested by Neil).
When we walked in we realised this may take some time. After the first floor we gave up and headed straight for the fifth floor food level. This place was great - we got to choose whatever we wanted, cuisine from around the world. We decided on some Thai food for main course. We weren't allowed any alcohol because the law is that you can't have it between 2 and 5pm - Crazy! We went onto dessert - what a choice! We managed to share (kind of) pancakes with chocolate and banana and waffles with chocolate sauce and nuts - Felt really sick after though!
So that we wouldn't spend our whole time in Bangkok in this shopping centre we skipped a few levels whicch must have saved us days and found our way to the Sony shop where we purchased an underwater case for our camera. Expect cool photots from under the sea in the future.
To get us back to base we caught a bright pink cab much to Tracey's delight (Just for you Megan!!)

Pink Cab

After a bit of a rest we headed out and down the madness of Khoa San Road - Backpacker heaven. We found ourselves a small bar to enjoy a couple of cocktails and chinese snacks. We wandered back in the wee hours!

Bangkok, Thailand