Jon the Traveller

Great place on Soi Rambuttri, a few minutes from the Khao San Road. The Sawasdee caters for many budgets within the budget range, from windowless rooms for 300 baht to mid-range quality aircon doubles for 800 baht.

The staff are pretty friendly, although those in the restaurant can be a little flaky at times, but that is mainly because the restaurant gets very very busy – indeed its open 24 hours and is busy for most of the time. It does a nice mix of both Thai and Western food, all cooked to a good standard.

For a good option in Banglamphu you cannot go wrong here.

Don Det to Pakse: Minibus with broken aircon.

Pakse to Ubon: Thai-Laos Friendship bus that kept going back to the bus station over and over.

Ubon to Bangkok: Overnight bus, sharing a blanket for most of the night with a random Thai girl who thought I was a giant pillow. Not complaining though!

Arriving in Bangkok I headed towards the Khao San Road, passing the area were the “Reds”- supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra – were busy setting up stages and roadside camps for the tens of thousands who would be descending on the city the following day to protest the governments treatment of Thaksin; the crippling poverty they are suffering from and generally to try to force the current government to dissolve and bring in a fresh parliament, hopefully led by someone who believes in their cause. A few days later I was back in Bangkok and it was still very busy with Reds and in their main encampments there was quite the carnival atmosphere, no trouble towards farang, more joy that you are in the area taking an interest.

While in the city I met up with Mat, the founder of the South East Asia 2010 Facebook group I have mentioned previously.

He was readying himself to move on to Malaysia, so we spent a few days wandering the city, running from persistent Thai whores and sorting our respective onward journeys – him to Penang and me to Kanchanaburi.

Laos was interesting, alot more built up than on previous visits, however that didnt really spoil it for me, except in Vientiane. The people are still as friendly as ever and the countryside especially in the north is simply stunning, and as long as neither change then I’ll no doubt keep returning to Laos.

I’ll be posting the remainder of my Laos entries and photo’s when I am in Bangkok later this weekend.

I’ll be reviewing my guest-houses from now on in the format shown below.  Also shall post these on Travelfish and other sites.

Stayed 6 nights here. Paid 340 baht for a double fan room with shared facilities.  For the price its pretty good, not much noise and facilities are cleaned at least twice a day what I saw.

The restaurant there is not that amazing but that’s not down to the food, more the staff there who can be a little off when it gets busy, or even just plain forgetful. The food itself is a good introduction to Thai food for those who do not wish to start straight on the street food. Menu also has a nice array of western food, which I found out is actually made at one of New Siam I’s sister properties, but that doesn’t really matter as they are very close by.

Location is on a sub-soi off Soi Rambuttri which is much more genteelthan the nearby Khao San Road, although its still a bit of a zoo at times. Going the other way from Soi Rambuttri brings you onto Th Pra Athit which is good as it has a riverboat pier on it and once on the river you can get to the main sites quite easily indeed, and even the sky-train should malls or the bigger markets be your destinations.

All in all I do recommend the New Siam 1 to people who want to stay somewhere quiet in the city, and yet still easily get to all big musts in Bangkok.

For a change I had settled on an early night in order to make certain I’d fully use the day ahead, and after a relaxing breakfast I returned to Wat Arun, and as I have linked in my previous post, I scored some good images, however the climb up the praang was beyond me, so I didn’t get some panoramic shots of the Bangkok sky-line or the river like I had intended, but I’ll be back.

Rather than heading back to Banglamphu, I thought I’d head up to Chatachuk market, this market is Bangkok’s largest and is only open on weekends. Its handily at the northern end of the Sukhumvit sky-train line, so air-con baby!! Let me tell you this, its awesome fun shopping on your own in a place like that – no women to deal with, which means no stress, and a stress free Jon is a happy Jon.

Unlike the day before when I didn’t really care for anything more than perfunctory bargaining – hey frankly my patience wears thin too easily when it involves blagging, or being blagged by the vendors on the Khao San Road, its just fighting a losing battle there – I really got into my stride while meandering the seemingly endless corridors of Chatachuk. Was good to enjoy myself in such a place and score some fabulous deals on shorts and tee’s. I happily lost 4 hours of my afternoon just looking around. Its a sea of humanity!

Friday 29^th really didn’t start it was more of a continuation of the day before, especially when you consider that Simona & I were drinking at the New Siam till the especially small hours.  Good thing about this long session is it came right after a great foot massage, which seemed to happen at the same time as my body finally figured out where & when it was, so I didn’t feel too weary of all the beer, which made the next morning easier to bear.

After seeing Simona off and watching the rain (yes it rained) stop, I hopped on the boat and went down to Wat Arun, The Temple of The Dawn, whose namesake is Aruna, Hindu Goddess of the Dawn. While the majority of the site is typical Thai devotional architecture, the praang of Arun is itself much different from everything around it.

The praang itself is arranged in the Hindu style that places the main tower in the centre of four smaller towers arranged at the cardinal points around a central one representing Mount Meru, the home of the gods.  This style is also very prevalent in Khmer devotional architecture, as I have previously seen at Angkor Wat.

However the most striking thing about Wat Arun is the main material used in the construction and decoration of the praang: porcelain shards used as ballast by Chinese merchantmen, who once laden down with heavy goods from Siam, no longer needed to retain the ballast.

Well, surprisingly the clouds never really shifted after the rain, so what pictures I got weren’t that great with little good light for me to take advantage of. I decided to return the day after and hope for better.

After much hassle – and a chance to fly on a very well appointed Airbus A380-800 – I finally arrived a couple of days ago in Bangkok. The flight from Dubai to here on the super-jumbo that is the aforementioned aeroplane was much better than the journey I had undertook before it, cramped legroom, hit & miss service and a endless loop of crying babies, and Hell of course!

Getting out of the airport was no hassle at all, having been before, and done my research before hand I knew exactly where to head to get a regular everyday taxi into the city.

A note about Thai taxi drivers. They have obviously heard that every Italian drives like they are in the Ferrari team for Formula 1, however they may have contenders in Thai taxi drivers. Either that or they think they are in car-chase scenes in Hollywood movies.

Anyway after a couple of near-death experiences I finally found myself at my guest-house and lugging my stuff up 4 flights of stairs, which finally proved how unhealthy I am, but never mind that, I’m sure a reduced diet, heat and lots of walking over the next few months will cure me of my extra baggage. The place itself is pretty good, its cheap and has a pretty good location that is especially handy for the river boat services that plough the Chao Prayha river. It also turned into the unofficial guest-house of a Facebook group of which I am a member, with a decent number of us from it all staying here for some or all of our time in Bangkok. I really do recommend it if you want a good place to stay off the KSR and is still close enough to that area and the big sights of the Grand Palace and Wat Pho, that little effort is expended in getting around.

I have met and spent a couple of fun days and nights with a group of people from Facebook (Hi Fabian, Lucy, Rachel & Simona), after they approached me hoping that I was who they thought I was from my image on FB. I’d thought about yelling across the restaurant when they walked in to it on Tuesday evening but after nearly 40 hours of wakefulness, I just could not find the energy. Roll forward a couple of hours later and the 5 of us are – as usual with long term travellers – very merry and very much acting like we have been friends for much longer than a late night.

Being an old Bangkok hand I took it upon myself (it could be said I just decided what the 5 of us would do, but that just is not how it is at all.) to show them a couple of places they had not thought about visiting. We set out to do a few fun things over the course of the day including visiting Wat Thawit – home of a 5tonne SOLID GOLD Buddha:

exploring Chinatown (not easily helped by the river not staying where I wanted it too and as a result we may have gotten a little turned around), spending a good [sic] few hours at Suan Lum Night Bazaar, which has vastly improved since I was last here, even if shopping with 3 women was the worst idea I’d ever had! We managed to do all of this using local transport – both the riverboat and the sky-train – which was surprisingly for Bangkok, still as excellent as they had been on previous visits.

There are still things I need to do here, including see Wat Arun, get out of town to Kanchanaburi for the day, get my hair cut and maybe do some shopping (you just can not do stuff for yourself when herding three women around so they don’t spend all their budgets in 1 night!), but I know I’ll continue to enjoy myself here.

So, here I am sitting in the restaurant of my guest-house, the New Siam 1 feeling pretty rough despite having had a decent while to acclimatise. I know its not jet-lag as I have had a civilised amount of sleep since arriving, its like every ounce of energy I had after each refreshing shower just seems to vanish with 30 minutes and I get to feeling really lethargic until I either sleep or have another shower. I know its not a hangover, as while I do get them, I am barely drinking alcohol here.

Just what it is has gotten me really puzzled and I cannot stand feeling like this all the time.

Answers on the back of your medical qualifications please!