Ah back to the writing with Choco Lienniz all over my fingers. Our first day back in Thailand was taken up by a lot of admin. We had to get Lonely Planet books or at least look for them. We found 'originals' for the same price as home and copies for half the price. In the end we opted for the copies and have yet to really use them yet. Will let you know how they are when we try. There was an American who was in our hostel. He never seemed to go anywhere. There seem to be a lot of foreigners who just seem to aimlessly bum around Bangkok without any clear aims. Seems like a waste of a holiday for me. We had to get laundry done. One woman said she could do it for a cheap price in the same day. When we brought them the laundry the price had increased and it would be the next day. Stupid bitch. She said mine was 9 kilos on its own, when I know it could not possibly be more than 6kg. Fuck her. We ended up finding another laundry place just off the back of Kho San Road. They wouldn't do it same day until we insisted and then wanted to weigh the laundry in a plastic basket. Why would I want to do that. We had our clothes in a carrier bag. We weighed his plastic basket and it was 1kg. This seems to be a favourite trick to get more money in Thailand as they did the same to us in Kanchanaburi. Just insist upon weighing it without the basket. So that sorted I went in search of dental treatment. My teeth had needed cleaning in the UK, but had missed my appointment. I found a place next to Burger King that would do it for 14 quid. Foreign keyboards unsurprisingly never have a pound key. I got them cleaned and I am sure I bled a lot as they scraped the shit out from under my gums. They told me to raise my hand if the pain got too much. I could feel it, but it never became too unbearable. Then they told me I had 3 cavities in three different teeth and should get fillings done. 3 cavities? I had had a mouth x-ray only a month before and they had said I had none. The likelihood of me getting 3 cavities in one month was really slim so I decided to take my chances that they were talking bollocks. All in all it was a productive day of bollocks.
We had originally planned to go to Khao Yai National Park, but Cannelle persuaded me it would be better later on, after the rainy season, when the leeches were gone. So we headed to Nang Rong for Phanom Rung. Not a lot happened as we checked into the hotel and had a shitty and expensive dinner. There was only Thai TV as well. We did have a giant cockroach in our bedroom. I tried to kill him, but missed. After that I realised he was scared so I just kept hitting the floor near him to steer him out of the room. Job done.
We had wanted to hire motorbikes to go to Phanom Rung and to finally try them, but it was 400 baht for an automatic. We realised there was a bus that went to a small town near the ruins. It ended up being 30 baht each one way and then its a 6km walk to Phanon Rung so it was good exercise. I would recommend doing it this way as its much cheaper. The locals still find it very weird to see a foreigner walking anywhere, but in general the Thais in Issan are much friendlier than elsewhere. The ruins themselves are really pretty. Its clear that the Khmer ruins are prettier than Thai ones. From Lonely Planet's description I had expected to find it on the edge of a volcanic crater, but it is still pretty and surrounded by trees. Its well worth the trip. While we were walking around a Thai woman approached us and asked us if we could help her. She was a tourism teacher and her students were taking an exam. She wanted to know if we could act as guinea pigs and if they could take us on a tour and she mark them. It seemed like a good opportunity for a free tour and we took it. Most of them were a bit rubbish and didn't tell us much we didn't already know. It did reinforce my belief that hiring a guide is not really necessary. Still it was fun. Their pronunciation is quite bad and they clearly need some work, but they were also super nervous. On our way back we grabbed a bus to Surin and saw a super fat monk get into his SUV. It was good to again see how much he must be starving himself on the path to enlightenment. We found a good, cheap hotel in Surin, which on first impressions was quite a nice town. We even found an expat restaurant which did Philly Cheesesteak. I was somewhat skeptical about the authenticity of that dish, but they delivered a very close effort. It was really, really good. So good in fact that we would come back the next night again and have the same thing.
The next day we got an early truck at 6.30am out to the elephant village. Once again Lonely Planet proved to be shit. It takes just over an hour and not two hours, so we were there a while before it opened at 8.30am. They also claim the last bus back is at 4.30pm, but we could find no evidence of any bus after around 3pm so be careful to head out for the morning show if you don't want to stay the night. Maybe that was why a bunch of foreigners were camped in the bus station to go back. There are also no buses between 11am and 2pm, so you are pretty much fucked if you watch the show as you have to hang around. My advice is to rent a motorbike and go yourself. Especially if you want to see the afternoon show at 2pm or the elephant bathing which was at 3pm or 4pm. I can't remember. Hmm too much Haribo on my notes. Or should that be too many. Nevermind. Anyway we arrived and had a quick look around the museum and visited the elephants where we were reprimanded by the 'Gods' or volunteers as I like to call them. Walking around like they are Gods gift to the elephants. Their money certainly is as it can pay for useful things like food and vets, but they are certainly not. If volunteers were really useful they would not have to pay to volunteer. The simple mantra should be that if you pay, you yourself are worthless. Still someone has to clean the elephant poo, so it saves someone some time. We then watched the morning show. It was a little uncomfortable, but better than riding them. I had to go back out to pay as we had entered before the ticket vendors had set up and as noone checks we could have watched it for free. We saw elephants dancing. We saw them throwing darts badly. Playing football. One seemed to really enjoy it. The baby elephants were really excitable and genuinely seemed to love doing their tricks. The older ones less so. There was one who painted a picture. Probably the most impressive. One slam dunked a basketball while walking on its hind legs. All the while we were hounded by women trying to make us buy bananas to feed the elephants. Maybe we might have bought some if we hadn't already spent double to watch the show. Still it was interesting to watch. While waiting for the non existent bus (see above) we saw one elephant break free and terrorise the locals into holding it back with spears. They chained the legs of some elephants together and there seemed to be little evidence of the natural enclosures they were supposed to build with the volunteer money. Its always a question of how much these areas are helping, but as we had seen a lot of mahouts wandering around the streets of Surin trying to get food for their elephants, it was evident that it helped somewhat. We grabbed another Cheesesteak and I read about how Obama had been absolutely minced in the first debate. Seemingly the biggest caning in ages. There was some dramatic movement towards Romney and even today its not clear which way the election will break.
The next day we got the train to Bangkok. A very long train to Bangkok. Fuck me that was a long time in 3rd class. I do like the fact that they can't fuck you with the trains in Thailand. Its computerised. I would not like to make the same confident statement for the buses. There was one other French couple in 3rd class. It seems like a few other travellers also travel the back routes, though we have barely seen anyone for the last week as we have been spending time well off the beaten track. There was an old man at the bus station who offered to help us find the bus. I thought it looked like the wrong direction and questioned his motives, but I was wrong. He was just a super helpful old man, who was trying to find taxis and tuk tuks for everyone. He even came to say goodbye to us when he got off the bus. He was an English teacher for the princess, but every non native English teacher I have met is barely at intermediate level for speaking and listening. We got back after an hour on the bus and met Jessica and Christophe (a French guy she had met coming from the airport). Cannelle was really happy to meet up with her best friend and on the 4th time we were in Bangkok we would finally visit it.
In the morning we went for breakfast and on the way back were stopped on the street by a Dutch girl, named Savine, who was looking for a hostel and would end up travelling with us for a week. We headed down to the Palace and were told that it was closed, so we could take a tuk tuk to some shitty place in the city. We decided to walk. Then we headed for the museum and got told it was closed as well and the man started drawing useless shit all over the map. Not sure what he was doing, but he also offered us a tuk tuk ride. I turned him down as well. Weird. They said the palace would reopen at 1pm, so we came back then. People stopped us again to say we weren't dressed appropriately, but sandals had seemed ok on other tourists. Finally we heard the tannoy announcing that we should not trust delaying tactics. Finally it made sense. They had been lying to us to get us to take their stupid tuk tuk tours. Oh well at least it had cost us nothing but time. However, the palace itself was quite disappointing, though the Wat was good. They had doubled the price for the big, golden reclining buddha, so just Cannelle went in as I did not really care. The palace ticket comes with a park area as well, but that was shut on the monday when we went there. Its nice to be in a part of Thailand where noone tries to fuck you over. Writing this now from Issan, makes me appreciate how vastly different the two Thailands are and how the majority of travellers only see the crappy side. Oh well. More fool them. We met Savine at 4pm (she had left to check in) and headed out to Nahm restaurant. We were given seats on the terrace as we had originally booked for 3 and its much better with a view over the swimming pool. The food is first class, but very spicy and authentically Thai. This caused a problem as if you order the degustation you must choose one dish from each section to share. The others did not like or could not handle spicy food. Eventually I persuaded them to go for the Venison anyway and the restaurant kindly let us choose two mains. They were super accommodating all evening. As the 50th best restaurant in the World you would expect it, but it was very good. They keep topping up your water though, so be careful or you may end up spending more than you want to on water. The location is beautiful and I really liked the food (though maybe I didn't love it). Be warned though that if you can't handle spices it is probably not for you. We grabbed another taxi out to Ekamai-Soi 5, which is a big clubbing area and to Nung Len. It was supposed to be the coolest bar in Bangkok and we had been told it has the best looking women, which may well be true. They certainly weren't foreigner chasing putas like most of the girls in Koh San Road. The clubs are a little different here though. There is no dance floor as such and people tend to stand around tables piled high with whisky bottles etc. There is not much space and almost noone dances. We went into the left side first and found a small crack to stand in. They had a live band doing covers of some English songs and also some Thai ones (that were probably covers given the fact that most people were singing along). They were pretty good and people would move, but not really dance. After a while we moved to the other side of the building and they had one of the best DJs I have seen in a club. Really cool. Great music. If there had been more space to dance it would have been awesome. Savine met a Thai rasta comedian who she had seen in a magazine, but he couldn't speak English. She also got hit on by a dickhead Yankee who came to chat with me, said he hated the English and was from Philly. I said I'd been to Philly twice and he said 'well yeah, I've been to London three times.' Cool. Competitive jock type. My favourite. Dickhead. He also told me he was a pimp. That I could believe. He did the fist bump and then left, signalling me over the crowd. Cool dude. We had a really good time in the club till nearly 2am before grabbing a taxi back. The best thing is that it was free. Maybe we will go back. From chatting with the French guys in our hostel it seems that we had a much better experience out there than they did in the tourist central area. We need to find a place with a good dance floor.
The next day we woke up late and went to get tickets to Chiang Mai by train. They gave us two options, but we elected for second class seated with fans for the evening as it was only 430 Baht and not nearly 1000. Then we went to Jim Thompson's house after a Burger King. The tour is quite nice and the house is a really cool place. Worth the visit. We then headed through Lumphini Park which is a really cool place. Beautiful location. Like a tiny Central Park surrounded by skyscrapers. Lots of people doing exercise and jogging. The more I think about it, the more I liked Bangkok. We headed to the Sky Bar, but we could not go to the top as you are not allowed up there until after 22.30 unless you are there for dinner. I think we may eat there in January as I really want to see the top and the bar below is nice, but not what we wanted. We ordered one coke between us as I was not going to pay loads for second best. They went to put it on ice, but I covered the glass as I didn't want any. I think they may have thought that it was a little rude of me. They brought us another one as an apology and I refused it as that was ridiculous. I will never be comfortable with the ridiculousness of 5 star hotel service. It really is like modern day slavery. Cannelle was feeling sick so she went home, the girls went for sushi and I went to meet Rob. He had wanted to take us out for dinner as a wedding present, but in the end he just took me to a really nice restaurant under the pretty bridge. It was not backpacker lifestyle in Bangkok for us. We ended up grabbing some beers and staying out till 2am chatting. Apparently he started on a 30,000 Baht salary a month, but was now earning 70,000 Baht a month working 21 hours a week. That's around 1,400 quid and a flat costs around 10,000. He reckons he could save 800 quid a month easily, which is as much as I saved in Paris. He reckoned I could get a job the next day if I wanted one as they were having problems recruiting new teachers and his director had said if he knew someone with a CELTA and half a brain he should let him know. It was always an option as Cannelle quite liked the city. We could have a good standard of living here, but I am not keen on teaching noone above Upper Intermediate. He said the corruption was rife here, even if the bureaucracy was not as shit as France. One of his friends was hit by a car and had to spend 3,000 quid on an operation and because the woman paid off the police, he could not get any compensation. I became more certain that having worked for the British Council it would always be easy for me to pick up work now. We traded some tips on teaching, which was quite useful.
In the morning Cannelle was really sick. She could barely move. So Savine went to the palace while we waited. We went on our ill fated tour of the closed park and then took a boat trip down the river. Then we bummed around a bit, dodging the guys trying to sell me suits and other useless people. An aside on taxi drivers. Get a government green and yellow taxi on meter or a pink one if that fails. If they can't take you on meter tell them to fuck off. Just to give you an idea how cheap this city is by meter. Koh San Road to the train station is around 55 Baht. Koh San Road to the bus stations are around 90 Baht. From Ekamai-Soi 5, which is around 12km across town and the furthest you can go in the city, to Koh San Road it was around 105 Baht at 2am. Therefore it is not possible to go for more than 100 Baht by meter unless the taxi driver is fucking you. Allowing for traffic prices could be up to 10 or 20 Baht more, but it really is cheap. Given the prices of the sky train and metro, it is cheaper to take a bus but super slow and second cheapest to take a taxi if there are 3 or more of you. We got to the train station and found our second class carriage. Only it was 3rd class. I pointed this out to the guard and he just laughed. I went to information and they told me that our carriage had been damaged and withdrawn from service. Ok so what would they do about it. We could pay extra for a bed or take 3rd class. 'What about the 22 seats listed on the screen.' Apparently they were in our broken carriage. Ok. Taking ages. I insisted I wanted our seats honoured. We headed to another screen. There were now 21 seats left. 'How can there be 21 seats if they weren't for sale?' Ah ok. Now we could have 4 seats. Fuckers. Not sure if our carriage had ever been second class, but either they were fucking us or saving those seats for the Thai passengers who had lost their seats. Nevertheless my sheer bloody mindedness and determination not to get fucked managed to secure us the seats I wanted. Arseholes. The other Thai passengers seemed upset to have gringos on their carriage and the woman kept trying to sell us overpriced breakfasts and drinks, but we had brought our own food with us. Eventually we settled into the reclining seats to sleep after Savine and I had had a long chat. Onwards to Chiang Mai.
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