A city of Mayhem

Reclining Budda at Wat Pho
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Allow plenty of time if you want to get anywhere in Bangkok, everyone wants to tell you where to go, what to do and sometimes its difficult to tell if they're being genuinely friendly or trying to scam you, most of the time it was the later!  To avoid the constant interuptions as we walked down the street with our backpacks we retreated instead into the TAT (tourist information) office for a bit of peace and quiet to book ourselves into a hotel and organise our onward travel plans!  Once done the next job was to sort Nick out with a custom made suit, and we were lucky to have a very good recommendation from our hotel, unforunately they were rather too good and Lizzi ended up with a tailor-made lambskin leather coat, which is ever so soft and Nick looks rather daper in his new attire!  We had arrived on a Sunday and the largest market in Asia is held on the weekends in Bangkok, eager not to miss it we took a look, and its pretty daunting from the sheer size of it as viewed from the train as we approached.  Our attempts at bargaining were laughed down fairly often as being a little too ambitious!  Pretty tired what we needed was a traditional Thai massage and also we did want to find out what Lizzi had let herself in for in Chiang Mai!

Wat Phra Krew
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The next 2 days were spent trying to visit the main tourist sites of Bangkok, 'very trying' at times when trying to cope with the cowboy tuktuk and taxi drivers outside the tourist sites in the heat!  We visited the Grand palace, regalia museum, emerald budda, Wat Phra Krew, Wat pho, golden reclining budda, Wat Arun, and the Teak mansion.  Wow, we had never seen anything like it before especially around the grounds of the national palace.  So much gold and colour, and architecture different from Europe, it was all pretty awesome.  The emerald budda was actually quite small and gets dressed in different gold garments according to the season, but the reclining budda is absolutely massive, probably about the size of 2 buses.  After all this we hopped on the night train up to Chiang Mai.