Highlights of Thailand
Finally landed in Bangkok after our slight detor on the flight. Our hotel that we booked a few months ago with STA Travel before we left turned out to be a five star luxury place, we must have had a serious discount. Still haven’t got the hang of this back packing yet! That night we saw the real Bangkok when we went out for a drink in a bar, bit of an eye opener! Lots of beer girls, middle aged western men with young thai girls on their arms, and of course the lady boys who were mostly stood on street corners. Found a great bar with live rock music, the lead guitarist was Thai, had huge hair, giant platforms, and flared trousers, different!
The next day we found the backpacker area – Khao San Road, definately more like it. Lots of cheap and cheerful guesthouses, ended up staying at one called Wally’s, basically a double bed in a very small room with fan, only good thing was it cost a pound each per night!! We went round the grand palace and saw the famous reclining buddha, it was huge!! Definately worth seeing.
Chiang Mai was the next stop on our trip, really nice place. Stayed at a great guesthouse called Libra – would recommend it to anyone. We went on a treck for two nights and three days, it took us up into the mountains, unfortunately the night before Miller was up most of the night with food poisoning. God knows how he managed a three hour treck the next day but he did! The first night we stayed in a giant bamboo hut with fellow treckers in the middle of a hill tribe village, was different! The ‘beds’ – several long pieces of bamboo on either side of the hut were very hard to sleep on though, was a long night! On the second day we went trecking for another few hours, saw some fantastic views from up in the hills and visited a waterfall, disaster struck when Miller slipped on the rocks at one of them, fell on his shoulder and cut his head open! He had to be escorted out of the jungle asap by our guide and a German guy we bumped in to who lived there with his wife and trained elephants – very surreal! Miller had his first motorbike ride to the nearest clinic where he was stiched up and sent back for tea to the second hill tribe village we were staying at. Was very pleased to be told by one of the australian ladies we were walking with that it will make a great girl pulling story in the future!!
After Chiang Mai we ended up on the slow boat to Laos. My god what a journey!! We firstly travlled by mini bus for five hours to a town called Chiang Khong, the guesthouse we stayed at was a complete dive, but we found a great restaurant down the road called the Bamboo guesthouse which served very good mexican food (yes in Thailand! we thought it was strange too!) and over looked the river. The guy who ran it recommended the Tee Pee bar down the road, turned out you could drink there as late as you wanted and they encouraged people to play there guitars. A couple we met – Lynda and Joel took there guitars down there and jammed, they were brilliant. Lynda is part of a famous band in Korea – Second Moon and is a great performer. So it turned into a surpisingly good night, another couple in the bar had flown all the way from Germany just to visit the bar after they were recommended it by a friend. So if you are ever stuck in Chiang Khong destined for the slow boat to Laos, make sure you look these two places up!!
On the second day we were stuck on the damn boat – which consisted of a load of wooden benches (and very uncomfortable ones at that) for seven hours on the first day, stopped over at a small town which turned all of it’s electricity off at 10pm so we had to go about by torch and candle light, and then sat on the boat again the next day for another six hours!! The river passed some lovely scenery, but not that nice! Things were helped along a bit by the Beer Lao served though. This has to be one of the nicest lagers we have both tried and it’s so cheap!!! It costs the same as two bottles of water, fantastic!!
written by Amanda
Tags: Thailand, Travel
Miller
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