Bangkok Thailand

I am off on another adventure for a month to South East Asia. I will be visiting Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Cambodia. Today the 18th of January was my first day out on the town, so to speak. After recuperating from my 15 hour flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong in a very cramped seat and then a short flight of 3 hours to Bangkok, I am ready to start my journey. I arrived here at 2am in the morning after a delayed flight from SFO (thank you very much Trump!) and another delayed flight from Hong Kong. I can’t say that Trump had anything to do with the second delayed flight but somehow I think he did. My room here is very nice but expensive. I had booked this room 30 days in advance (cheaper) for $120 a night. Because of my late arrival I added another night. For $240!!!! Ouch! Just wait….it gets better. After 6.5 hours of visiting Buddhist sites I am not a happy camper at the moment. I will explain mixed in with photos so that I don’t bore you all with my rant.

The view from my room with smog in the background.

I bought a small pocket camera just before I left so that I didn’t have to always take my heavy camera with me. Little did I know that it was date stamping all of the photos I took. It is fixed now but all of the photos from this camera taken today have date stamps. This is the first of many small annoyances of my day.

Canal behind hotel that leads to the river that the hotel sits on.

The white elephant in the room.

Door man and hostess. I asked if they had my size in his outfit and they said no. Imagine that!

Gold plated stupa.

Wise old clay man.

Probably shouldn’t mess around with what ever this is.

Reclining Buddha. This is the posture he took just before his passing.

I have read that it is solid gold. But I also read that it is gold plated. It weighs 5 tons so I doubt that it is solid gold. But who knows….maybe.

I don’t like crowds. I don’t like being part of a tour group. So I hired a taxi to take me to all of the sites that I wanted to see. 350 Baht ($11) an hour. Reasonable compared to the tourist group prices. Since I didn’t have a phone to call him he would drop me off and pick me up at an agreed time. After the first two stops and thousands, I mean thousands of people, tourists and children, I asked if there was a place I could rest and get a beer at. In Thailand you can only buy alcohol between the hours of 11am and 2pm plus another time in the afternoon that I don’t have a clue to as to what it is. So he stops at a shop 10 minutes before 11am. He doesn’t drink so he didn’t realize it was too early to buy beer. So we head to the next stop. This is where we become friends. He parks blocking part of the road (it’s okay in Thailand for a short while), leaves the car running with the AC on and goes and buys me a beer! And I can sit in the car away from the crowds relax and enjoy a reasonably priced beer. He says that most taxi drivers don’t do this. I agree they don’t. And thank him. Oh I forgot to mention that he doesn’t speak English. He’s got two phones on the dash. One we speak into and it translates out loud and the other one is a regular phone. Some of the translations don’t work so well so I get a couple of laughs from that.

This was my lunch. Looks good I agree. And it tasted good. And the price was based on how much it weighed. Which I should have asked what the approximate price would be. But I didn’t. River shrimp and they tasted like lobster. Luckily I only ate a third of them so that I could have two more meals. You may ask “how much did it cost?” $140 US dollars! I will repeat it $140 US dollars!!! That ended my day immediately. I was tired and had had enough of all the crowds. My taxi bill for the day was half of what it cost for my lunch! Looks like I will be eating “cup of noodles” for the rest of the trip.

I leave Bangkok tomorrow headed for 12th century Buddhist ruins. And my room only costs $25 a night. And I’m sure I can find some Top Ramen to eat. Hopefully the gloomy weather that is here isn’t there. I am not very pleased with any of the photos I have taken so far.