It wasn’t the best of starts to my trip when my connecting flight in Copenhagen was delayed. As everything in the airport was shutting down one-by-one I began to wonder if there were any flights back to Dublin. Arriving in Bangkok three and a half hours late and in the dark I thought it best to get a taxi straight to my hostel. After a few minutes trying to explain to the taxi driver that the hostel had the same name as the street it was on, he finally gave up and just drove me there. I was having a bit of trouble trying to find the hostel in the dark, so I began to panic and booked into the first place I could for about twice the cost. Once my bags were offloaded I went for a stroll down the street only to stumble onto the hostel, and a few friendly faces to boot.

Waking up the next morning with a disorienting mix of hangover and jetlag, I wasn’t too sure where I was. The next few days were pretty much wasted getting familiar with city and how to get around. The city of angels is a pretty crazy place whose strong Buddhist side seems at odds with its excesses, where on many surrounding streets sex, food and drink are readily available for sale.
A couple of days after arriving I met up with a friend of my cousins who immediately invited me to join him and a few friends on a long-weekend trip to the island of Koh Chang, just next to the border with Cambodia.

Once there we got busy relaxing by the beach. A nice change for the hustle and bustle of Bangkok, where there’s not much to do except snorkeling and drunken late night swims.

On returning to Bangkok and three more days of lazy sightseeing I thought it was time for a change of scenery. When I found that there was a bus running to Chaing Mai in the north of Thailand for 50 Baht (around one Euro), it wasn’t really a tough decision on where to go.

On arrival in a chilly Chaing Mai, I found some cheap accommodation and set off to see the sights. Wat fatigue was definitely beginning to set in. One strange thing I did notice about the city was that a lot of the dogs seemed to wearing tee-shirts and other types of clothes. It was later explained to me that owners thought that the dogs would be cold in winter, but that still doesn’t clarify why one dog I saw was wearing underpants, unless he somehow managed to get them on himself. I found a really nice reggae bar close to where I was staying where you could sit by the bonfire and chat to the friendly regulars.

Next stop Pai.