8 Days and Nights in Bangkok

While we were in Bangkok, we visited a very impressive aquarium called Siam Ocean World. They have several levels below ground that are filled with fish from all over the world(as most aquariums do : ) ). We saw Grey Nurse sharks, Sand Tiger sharks, Leopard sharks, Manta rays, Otters, Beavers, Penguins, all types of tropical and colourful fish, and some Spider Crabs, which look like creatures from a horror film!

We also watched The Dark Knight in IMAX. This is the first feature film to be shot as an IMAX picture, so it is worth the effort.

For most of our trip throughout Thailand, we had been spending our time at the lower end of the hotel scale, and Harriet wisely suggested that we should upgrade to some luxury to end it. Our last few days were spent in a 4 star hotel called the Davis. We swam in the pool, enjoyed the enormous buffet breakfast, and lounged on the large bed. It was just the thing that we needed to complete our trip.

We boarded our plane for Melbourne at nighttime, and arrived into Melbourne the following morning, where my father was there to pick us up.

7 Market

On a Saturday and Sunday in a place called Chatuchak is a market that puts all other markets to shame. It is enormous, packed with everything you could ever hope to buy, and from what we could see, there is a decent amount of quality merchandise- not just tat!

We spent a long time in the art section of the market, where you aren’t allowed to take photos, but the paintings there were magnificent. We strongly considered buying a few, but as we were wary of how much luggage we were allowed, so we had to be happy with a promise that we would return and make some purchases at a later date.

As we weren’t allowed to take photos in the art section, I took some photos of Harriet at lunch!

6 Tiger Temple

After our arrival back into Bangkok, I booked myself in for a trip to the Tiger Temple, while Harriet stayed back and moved into a posher hotel where she could be pampered.

The first stop on my tour was at the Graveyards of allied prisoners who had died while building the Burma railway. This was a very solemn visit, and we were not allowed to enter the site of the graves- probably to preserve it, which I completely appreciate.

My tour itinerary said that we had a museum on our trip as well, so I found a museum, went in and had a look around. Little did I know that this was not the museum that I was supposed to be in, it was a 15 minute drive away. When I came out, my tour group was gone, and I was left in a small town in Western Thailand on my own.

Fortunately I spotted a guide who had spoken to us when we had arrived and explained my situation while waiving my hands frantically. I don’t know whether it was the hand waiving or not, but he found out where I was supposed to be and put me on a motorbike taxi to catch up with my tour group at the bridge over the River Kwai.

After a few other stops, we found our way to the Tiger Temple, a destination I have had on my list for over 5 years. The Tiger Temple is a sanctuary run by Buddhist monks for Tigers who are at risk from poachers, or need to be cared for specially. It looks a bit like a zoo- with high walls to stop animals escaping, but the animals wander freely without cages- there are boars, and donkeys, and buffalo, chickens, and of course Tigers. The tigers are chained up (to stop them eating the other animals and humans), but as humans have reared them, they are completely accustomed to having people close to and even touching them, which is what you can do. In the Tiger area, you can pat the Tigers, and if you make a large donation, you can cuddle them as well!

As we wandered around the temple area, you can see Tiger cubs, and get your photo taken with them as well. If you are really keen you can volunteer with the monastery, and work there for 3 months, 6 months, as long as you like. For the big cat lovers with a bit of free time and cash, it would be the excursion of a lifetime.

5 Kao Sok – Rain, Tubes and Monkey business

The next morning in our tree house, we awoke to various sounds from outside. The pleasant chatter of monkeys, the playful song of birds, and the thunder of a torrential downpour on the roof. It honestly sounded like there was a god-sized bucket of water being emptied on top of us.

We had no idea if we would be able to leave without getting drenched, but when I looked out, the canopy of the rainforest provided adequate cover for us to get to the restaurant for breakfast. In the light I could see the tree house we were staying in, or really a house on stilts, with stairs that led down to the dirt path that ran alongside the river Sok. The river was very full – about 10 metres across with a strong current.

In the afternoon, after riding an elephant, Harriet and I got to try out the current. We joined Liam and Lindsay, a couple from Liverpool on a tube ride down the river. Tube ride? Well, take a car tube, fill it up with air, put in on the river, whack a human on top and hey presto! The current does the rest. Helped by the little Thai guides that come and push you off your tube while you scream blue murder like a big girl, only to find that the river is less than waist deep and there is no danger at all. It is much fun!

Though its not nearly as much fun as watching monkeys ransack the next-door neighbours place. Harriet and I were in our tree house getting changed after our tube ride when we heard a kafuffle going on outside. We went outside and saw lots of movement in the trees, and the odd monkey sound. We looked up at the branches of the trees and monkeys just seemed to appear out of the foliage, swinging forward and landing the balcony of the hut next door.

Our neighbour had left his balcony door and windows open. It seemed that monkeys had sniffed a chance at naughtiness and come running from neighbouring countries. More and more of them came out of the trees and headed straight for the open room to join the party. The sound of thuds and glass breaking intermingled with shrieks of delight from the monkeys came from within, with Harriet and I doing our best to document the event on our cameras.

I must say that it was a little bit naughty of Harriet and I to spend 15- 20 minutes taking photos of the fun before raising the alarm, but we did get a couple of good photos, and when we did eventually spread the word, we managed to meet some other travellers! So we spent an evening drinking beer with some British girls and an American called Dave, whose room was ransacked by monkeys.

During the evening, we were visited by lots of bugs, and a nice toad. The girls were so happy to have such visitors! Liam and Lindsay joined us a little later in the evening, and we kicked on until they shut the bar, and even after then we convinced them to let us stay and keep boozing.

In Kao Sok it rained almost consistently from the moment that we got there to the moment that we decided to cut short our stay in the south of Thailand to escape the relentless donwpour. Harriet booked us Business class tickets on a plane back to Bangkok from Surithani for the meagre sum of £40 each.

4 Transition

The time came to leave the Island of Koh Tao and commence the six-hour boat journey plus a two-hour drive to the Rainforest of Kao Sok. We were expecting an odyssey, and it turned out to be one.

A taxi driver who was aware that we were running late took us from our hotel at the Koh Tao Cabana to the pier. He took us to the wrong pier, and almost boarded the wrong boat to the wrong destination. Thank goodness for that little Thai woman running towards us, waving a ticket and shouting as we boarded the gangway. Goodness knows where we may have ended up. Phuket, probably. Or maybe… somewhere else. Who knows?

Once we did board the correct boat and it started to lurch violently through the water, we moved directly to first class to avoid the seasickness. However, there was an Englishman in first class who had succumbed to the undulations of the sea, and spent the entire trip throwing up noisily into a bag. Now there was only so much of this we could stand- I did offer him some advice I had learned to combat le mal du mer- get some fresh air, look toward the horizon, but he ignored it and continued hurling. Shortly afterwards, the choppiness of the sea almost caused me to join him in his malady, and I spent most of the journey on deck following my own advice, unwilling to move an inch for fear of disturbing the careful balance within my stomach.

2 hours later after our boat journey began, we docked somewhere (I honestly don’t know where) amidst squawking taxi drivers vying for business, and had to change boats, having a half hour window between arrival and departure. We risked getting completely lost and left behind to dash into town for some seasickness tablets.

The next journey went blissfully as I slept the entire way- good old seasickness tablets!

We awoke to find ourselves at our destination- Surithani. Or so we thought. Our itinerary said that we would be picked up “as we disembarked the ferry”, so we ignored the cacophony of Thai’s telling us to get onto this bus or that bus, confident that we were being picked up. I did feel a little twinge of nervousness as the buses departed with every other tourist on board; leaving just Harriet and I left on the pier, but trusted that the itinerary was correct.

What we didn’t know is that for the first time, the ferry had arrived early and had not docked at Surithani- it had docked at Donsak, half an hour away from where we were supposed to be. The buses that the Thai's had tried to get us to board were going to take us to Sirithani pier- where our driver was waiting for us.



So Harriet and I waited patiently at the wrong pier for no-one to arrive. After two hours passed, we started making phone calls and discovered our issue- and the travel agent sent someone to come and get us. It was a young Thai gentleman and our transport was his pickup.

We were both squashed into the cab of the Thai gentleman’s pickup, Harriet against the window and me in the middle with my leg constantly pressed against the gear stick. I thought that this would be a safety hazard, but the driver proved to be much more dangerous than the lack of space. He didn’t like any particular lane; he liked to drive in about half of each. Throughout the trip, he was more interested in either hooting the horn with his elbow, chatting on the mobile or chewing on leaves than watching the road- it was an adrenaline filled ride!

Luckily we arrived accident free to the Surithani pier, and onto our transfer, arriving into the tree house in the rainforest at night….

3 Koh Tao

After spending an uneventful, but hot night in Chumphon, Harriet and I took the ferry to Koh Tao on a beautiful day, sailing past small tropical islands such as this one!

Koh Tao is an island in the east of Thailand- perfect for anyone who likes diving or lying on the beach. Due to my PADI certificates being in a container ship en route to Melbourne rather than in my holiday gear, it took a few days for us to sort out our diving trips.

While we were waiting, we hired a long tail boat to take us on a lap of the island to some of the best snorkelling spots. Snorkelling does have its advantages over diving- the main one being that you don't lose colour when you are on the surface; when you dive even 2 metres beneath the surface, reds and oranges start to disappear. The fish seemed to know that we were coming, and as soon as we got in the water, we were surrounded by a school of tropical fish! It was great fun.

Wandering around the island, we met a few of the locals, whose interesting names deserve mention- Church and Nacho (divemasters), and Kester the Scottish yoga teacher.

Kester deserves a special mention as he actually got me interested in doing Yoga! He was a 6ft 4” Scotsman with big blonde dreadlocks, who radiated contentment. His classes put a focus on the spiritual side of the yogic practice, and after each of the two sessions that I did, Harriet and I walked out feeling very centred and relaxed. For the first time in months, I felt like I had a clear head- like I could actually listen to someone when they were talking to me rather than my mind just racing with other matters that I considered more important. The lead up to the wedding had been a logistical whirlwind which had enveloped all in its path, so it was so therapeutic to be able to get our brains to slow down again.

We stayed at the Koh Tao Cabanas, a secluded resort at the far end of Sairee beach. Our cabana was a beautiful but rustic hut positioned at the top of a hill. It had an outdoor bathroom and a balcony with a hammock that I made good use of. It wasn't all bliss though: to get to the hut required a good 4 minutes of climbing up the hillside stairs, which was exhausting given that it was extremely humid, but the major problem was the noise.

There was a nightclub on the beach. It was a long way from our hut, but it would play music that would sail out onto the bay, drift across with the wind and move straight up the hill to our huts, causing the noise to sound like it was coming from three doors down…. So the location of our hut wasn’t ideal, but we did get a visit from a gecko or two.

The diving made up for any complaints. Harriet wasn’t feeling well the day that we finally went diving, so I went out to the Japanese gardens the first day, Chumphong Pinnacle the next (which was apparently one of the best dive sites in SE Asia) and joined Harriet at the Japanese gardens in the afternoon.

This was the first time that I had dived outside of the murky depths of Wraysbury (a filled in quarry near Heathrow where I did my dive training), and I was to be treated to the wonders of the warm shallows of Thailand.

If nature were a company, its creative department would be the coral reefs. Gliding above and around cliffs covered in forests of aquatic plant life, you see creatures that look like they belong in a Lucasfilm production rather than in nature. The weird, the wonderful, the truly hideous and extremely dangerous all co-exist down here in the photosynthetic jungle of the reefs.

The experience of diving was amazing. Following the divemaster, we floated effortlessly through the water, hearing nothing but the sound of our own breathing and the faint whistling sounds that your eardrums create, like having a shell to your ear. Above, below, and all around you are tropical fish swimming by- neon-coloured and fluorescent, some in schools, others even come up and clean you (oddly enough, these are called cleaner fish). We saw triggerfish, angel fish, batfish, a couple of Stingrays hidden underneath rocks (yay!) little cleaner fish that cleaned my ears, giant grouper fish- (that were truly giant), and thousands of others. One of the highlights of the trip was a 20 metre-high swirling school of barramundi, like an under water twister. I even got to do a little cave dive… we swam through a cave and saw a lot of nothing, but I would still go through again.

As we departed the dive site at the end of the day, there was a storm on its way in, which threw the dive boat around violently. The long-tail (a boat that took us from the shallows to the dive boat) was thrown up and down so much that the dive masters had to be abandoned, and the long tail took off, leaving the poor dive masters stranded on the boat. How we laughed as we sailed to safety.

My 30th birthday occurred on Koh Tao- not a bad place to spend it! A nice red snapper dinner, followed by a dessert of banana fritters, lit by candles provided by a loving wife was a wonderful way to spend my 30th!

2 The Yellow Army

The day after we arrived into Bangkok, Harriet and I needed to make our way 300km south to a town called Chumphon in order to catch a ferry to the island destination of Koh Tao. We headed downstairs to the hotel reception to book ourselves a train.

Our guide at reception was very helpful , though her English wasn’t very good – this was often the case in Thailand. Most people speak a little English, but not enough to communicate precisely- ie “Taxi” they understand. “Will this Taxi cost more than 300 baht?”; they will not understand. Apparently (I heard from several sources) the English education in Thailand is very poor. But I digress. The woman at the counter who was trying to book us a train ticket was saying something along the lines of “no trains”. This was somewhat disturbing for us, as we didn’t fancy a 300km walk, so we asked for her to clarify- and she did so by saying “protesters No trains.”

(the next paragraph is political- those who have an aversion to politics look away now) What had happened was that the anti- Thaksin movement in Thailand - which had succeeded in sending Prime Minister Thaksin back into exile in London- was still not happy with the current government under Prime Minister Surayat, saying that it was just basically made up of Thaksin cronies. The protesters, known as the yellow army (for they wore yellow to show whose side they were on), had been clashing with police throughout the last few weeks, and taken over several government buildings, including government house. They were currently occupying these buildings, and calling on the government to resign. The army, which had overthrown Thaksin two years ago was staying put, saying they were not getting involved one way or another. Prime Minister Surayut had declared a state of emergency in Thailand, and subsequently shut down all trains running south of Bangkok. Hence, we had no easy way of us getting down to Chumpon.

So there were no trains. We had a few options. Either stay in Bangkok, get a bus that would leave at 7pm and arrive at 4am at the pier(not our hotel), or get a taxi. We took the latter –a Mr Karem drove us down in a people carrier for 4500 baht, but we rode in relative comfort, and got to sleep in a hotel.

We also got the added benefit of seeing all of the crazy motorbike antics on the road. Motorbike is the preferred mode of transport for all the family… literally. We saw a mother driving a bike, with a child on the back, and a child on the petrol tank with another child sitting on her lap. It was astonishing!

1 An eye-opening welcome to Bangkok!

The first thing that you notice when you arrive into a tropical country is the heat. The automatic doors of the airport slide open, and you walk into a warmth that envelops you like you have just stepped into a bath. Not that I was complaining.

The next thing that we noticed was that the taxi that we were going to travel in had no seatbelts… the taxi driver apologised politely about that, but I was soon to realise that the road laws in Thailand are not quite as stringent as they are in the UK or Australia. On the road from the airport into Bangkok, our taxi driver did a u-turn on a motorway, crossed a little dirt road and continued onward through the traffic, avoiding cows and other animals that walked autonomously along the side of the road. Here in the outskirts of the city, car parks and farms exist side by side.

We rode along the motorway towards the centre. Looking out the window of the taxi the view was dominated by characterless high rise apartment blocks, then suddenly a golden Buddhist temple would wink at you from between the buildings and disappears back into the greyness. These temples appeared and vanished as we zoomed along the motorway, like flowers growing out of a concrete footpath.

The taxi took us to our first destination - the Rose Hotel in Bangkok located in an area called Patpong. Patpong seemed, on paper, to be a lovely area- it had plenty of nice hotels in the vicinity, so it must be reasonably classy... right? Ten days and 300km later, in the midst of a monsoon downpour, we were informed, to our slight embarrassment, that Patpong is in fact the red light district of Bangkok.

So while Harriet had a nap in the hotel, I went out and explored the slums of the city. As I walked down the main street, it wasn’t long before several men were coming up to me offering me all sorts of experiences. In all honesty, I was looking for a Sauna, so I asked if one of these men could direct me to one. Excitedly the man led me upstairs to a room containing several young Thai girls with towels, telling me that this was a spa. I said that I didn’t think that this was what I was after, and made a very quick exit, running back to the safety of the hotel, with several Thai men trying to harangue me the entire way back.

Harriet awoke to see me with a very flustered look on my face, and I think that I said something like “I didn’t think Bangkok was THAT bad!”

So Harriet and I went out to have a look around together. I thought that having Harriet on my arm would deter the "salesmen", but it actually had no effect at all. We found out that if you ignore them, they follow you, if you show any sign of indecision, they follow you, however if you firmly say "no", they will leave you be. They are salesmen after all, and do not work for sales they can't make.

This discovery left Harriet and I free to explore the area, but we didn't really need much convincing to sit down and enjoy some cuisine. We found ourselves a lovely little restaurant not far from the hotel where we enjoyed some flavoursome and inexpensive Thai food. A welcome respite from a hectic introduction to Thailand.