On the morning of our departure from Hong Kong, we waited around our hotel until 10:30am for a local jewelry store to open their doors. As a delayed birthday gift, Jenny was hoping to get a nice pendant she had spotted the previous day. After our purchase, the store owner kindly escorted us to our bus stop on the next street. You simply won’t get that service level in Ottawa stores! Jenny was pleased to hear that she could get free yearly cleaning of her jewelry! I’m not sure that would be too convenient! Hong Kong’s airport is vast. We had to take two trains to get to our departure gate. Our flight with Hong Kong Express Airlines went well.
Thailand’s Immigration lines were fairly long. On arrival, Jenny already felt lost as she wasn’t recognizing any Chinese characters but only saw Thai script (and some English). We purchased some local currency at the airport. We lined up for the public taxi and showed the address of our target hotel to the dispatcher. Our taxi driver did not understand much(or any) English. Bangkok’s traffic is really bad – even on toll roads. Driving is again on the left hand side. Every time Jenny tries to get into a taxi, she opens the driver’s door! Our taxi driver dropped us on a street corner and pointed us in a direction. Shortly after the taxi left, we realized that he had not dropped us close to our target hotel but rather on tourist strip. We were taken a back by the number of foreigners/backpackers on this side street. After walking a block, we stopped at “Rambuttri Village Inn” where we took up a room. Victoria got a folding bed. After settling in, we took a walk around the neighborhood. There were plenty of foreigners hanging out everywhere. Every other building in the area was either: a hotel, a massage parlor, an internet cafe, a restaurant or a bar. Clearly this was Bangkok’s gringo location. We needed a bit of time to adjust to the exchange rate here (30 THD ~1 CDN). We got the feeling that most backpackers had been here for weeks, if not months, but in fact there was a constant coming and going at our hotel front desk. Finally we could wear our shorts and sandals!
We started our second day with an American breakfast, our first on the trip, at local restaurant. Afterwards, we ventured out on the Chao Phraya Express, a river taxi, which was seemed to be the most convenient way of getting around town. From these frequent boats, we could see plenty of temples. There were barely any reminders of the upcoming Christmas holiday here, except for some foreigners wearing Santa hats. We got off the river taxi at Bangkok’s Chinatown. It was hard to recognize this area as a Chinatown. The streets and sidewalks were very busy. Jenny’s was amazed that we could follow any map direction in this area. Back at the hotel, we enjoyed our roof top pool for the later part of the afternoon. It was sometime difficult to choose a restaurant as we usually liked to stop our choice wherever we saw locals eating but in this area of Bangkok it was impossible to find any locals eating. We never saw so may massage parlors. There were even places that offered leg massage done by dropping your legs in an aquarium-like basin filled with tiny fish that appear to nibble at our skin. In order to avoid mistreating the fishes, I opted to skip this massage treatment. We booked on-line our airline tickets for Koh Sumai, our Christmas beach destination.
On our third day, we tried various local transports from river taxi, to bus, to subway, to skytrain and to the famous tuk tuk (three wheel motorcycle taxi). We ended up in Chinatown for a late afternoon walk. Victoria did a bit of souvenir shopping.
Bangkok surprised us by its number of foreign tourists, at least around our hotel area. Although I had always heard that Thailand was a very cheap travel destination in terms of accommodation, food, etc., this was not our experience. May be this is true outside the touristy area but we can’t say. The Thai names (eg. street names) are really testing our memory as these appear very long and uncommon to us. As we felt there were limited things to visit in Bangkok, we decided to cut our visit short by a day. Also, the 7-Eleven convenience stores are really really popular in Thailand. It is said that Thailand has to itself over half the number of 7-Eleven in the entire US.