Off the Couch and On the Road

After trying to sleep through a 4 hour animated discussion between my hostel roomates about what I like to call “The British Backpackers Guide to Bangkok’s Ping-Pong Girls”, I gave up and resigned not to do very much on my first day in Bangkok. I found an street stall selling iced coffee and decided things were looking up if I could find coffee in Indochina (the recipe – a large cup full of ice, mix the espresso with sweetened condensed milk, sugar and a white powdery substance and pour over ice. I obviously need to find an appreciation for tea).

In the afternoon, I caught a metered taxi (lesson learned) to the hotel where I would meet my tour group, and slept for the remainder of the afternoon in air-conditioned bliss. My tour turned out to be a pretty cool group of 7 mostly-British gap year students, with a few Aussies and a Swiss added in for good measure. Our group leader Sakai was a cool Aussie guy who moved to Cambodia to become a monk and spent 8 months in a vow of silence, amongst other awesome travel adventures.

We all ate dinner at a local semi-street restaurant where the food was good and cheap, skipped the touristy bars with overpriced drinks and karaoke, and headed for a 7-11 for cheap beer, joining thousands of others sitting on Khao San’s roadside people-watching until we could barely manage to keep our eyes open and returned to our hotel for a good night’s sleep.

-Sarah

The last few weeks in Sydney seemed a blur of shopping, packing, goodbyes and trying to watch as many Grey’s Anatomy episodes as possible (I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but ohmygod Meredith??!!). In the midst of all that I somehow managed to get myself organised and on the plane, arriving in Bangkok late last night, to the delight of the taxi touts at the airport, just hanging out for a naieve, tired Aussie girl to come stumbling bleary-eyed across their path.

Ok, I know you’re supposed to find the metered taxis, and I’m absoloutly sure I was ripped off. But it was at least 3am Sydney-time and equivalent to the cost of an airport taxi in Sydney, so I thought of it as kind of an advance payment on my Karma for this trip, and Buddha and I called it even.

-Sarah