The next day we made our way to the Imperial Palace, the residence of the King and Queen of Thailand. We caught a train and then a cab, we were fast learning to avoid tuk tuks, they were cheap but the unscheduled stops were too much for us to handle. The cabs were only a little more expensive and they took you straight to where to wanted to go, provided you could explain it to the driver. Between our small pocket map and a lot of pointing we arrived at the palace with a minimum of fuss and walked past the guards who were all armed with impressively large machine guns. The Palace and attached Wat (Temple) are both as impressive if not more so than Wat Pho. Once again the pictures, pretty as they are can't convey the scale or detail here, only getting on a plane and seeing it for yourself can do that. Some photo's for all you photo fans out there: The Big Gold Tower, More Temples, Monks, Royal Guards, Snakey Things, Totem Thingy, gorgeous murals and the Birdman Statue.

After we were done there we walked around a little and found some form of local football/hacky-sack cross. There was one team of seven and they tried to keep a large rattan ball aloft as well as land it in the swinging hoop suspended about 3m above the ground. The very excited loud speaker commentary in Thai was only drowned out by the crowd every time the ball landed in the hoop, the volume of the applause being roughly proportionate to the trickiness of the kick that sent it there (the biggest cheer of the afternoon was for a karate-kid/crane style flying kick). We watched for a while and then took a long walk which resulted in the aforementioned haircut and some sort of proposition from an inebriated Thai gent that was aimed at one of us (at first I thought he was after Em, but by the time we left I was not so sure). The night ended with a confusing taxi ride that may have gone on all night in ever decreasing circles if I hadn't needed to relieve myself, giving a security guard the chance to come over and translate for the taxi driver. The next morning we moved hostels to the Khao San Rd area (the main backpacker haunt originally started by a bunch of Australians), having tired of our original location which was mostly frequented by old, fat, bald, seedy-looking men with very young "girlfriends" (no offence to old, fat, bald, seedy-looking men), it's not that we're right in the backpacker scene either but we much prefer to hang out with people that have similar motives for coming to Thailand. The feel around the backpacker area was noticeably different (lots of young hippy types) and the prices were a lot closer to our modest budget. The Thai's have figured out that backpackers are a fairly tight lot, most of them having worked pretty hard to see, do and judging by the amount of bars, drink as much as possible on a finite amount of cash. We found a converted combi selling 1L bucket-o-cocktails (lots of ice but still huge) for about $6 a pop and settled in for what ended up being a great night and our first real taste of Bangkok's legendary night life. We met a lot of people including Matt and Cammi a lovely Canadian couple (see you in Canadia guys), Leah a fun-loving oz girl who became my street dancin' buddy and a host of walk-by sellers, hoping that the cheap drinks had loosened our wallets (they hadn't ........ well not for anything but more cheap drinks anyway). The next day we nursed our hangovers with fruit juice shakes, watched some sweaty men beat the crap out of each other (muay thai style) and waited for our plane to Colombo. We would be back in Thailand in about three weeks and next time we were going to shoot straight through Bangkok and head for one of the islands, having just about had our fill of cities.