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Flag Annie Arrived in Bangkok on Sunday 28th Oct.and stayed in the infamous Khao San Road area. A huge contrast to what we had been used to! Lots of backpackers, lots of bars, restaurants etc..a bit like Temple Bar, but with hot sticky weather! Oh and many,many Thai women..and yes, they are all stunningly beautiful! (Even the Ladyboys..had to point a couple out to Brian, as he had difficulty telling the difference!!) Some Thai girls are definitely more "available" than others too!We had to wait a week in Bangkok for our Vietnam and Laos visas to be processed, so we took a trip down the river in the river taxis, Stopping off to see the many Wats (Buddhist Temples)They are really amazing, so ornately decorated with precious gems and a myriad of colours. One of them, Wat Pho, has a 40ft reclining Gold buddah!Bangkok is a very busy city,very commercial, but the Thai's are a friendly race, so it was a good experience. We looked forward to moving on though. On Thursday, we took a bus to a place called Kanchanaburi, about 2 hours outside Bangkok. It is the site of the famous bridge over the river Kwae. We stayed on a Kwae riverboat that night,after going to see the bridge, which was rebuilt after the Allies bombed it in 1945.Back to Bangkok,we got our visas on Friday evening and left the following morning for CambodiaBrian From Bombay we flew to Bangkok, not really knowing what to expect as you hear so much about the place, some true and some Urban Myth. The first thing that struck me when we arrived was that we were now back in a 1st world country, which is clean and modern. It was a smooth ride from the airport to the centre of town and we found a cheap clean guesthouse very easily arriving on spec. Walking to find our guesthouse we were next struck by the amount of backpackers and tourist in this town, sometimes it was hard to spot a local. Our adventure didn't seem so adventurous now but we had to use Bangkok as our base until we had organised our visa's for Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.This took three days so we had some time to look around and do some of the essentials like laundry, develop photos etc. We walked for most of our sightseeing, saw the temples and the main markets, Bangkok is a town where you can get anything, and I mean anything. One night we had a look around the Patpang area and were constantly being invited into see a ping-pong show, neither of us like table tennis that much so we declined the offers - didn't realise that the sport was so strong in Thailand!!! For a bit of variety we decide to get out of the city for one night while waiting on the visa's, so we headed to Kachanabury and the Famous bridge over the River Kwai. It was well worth the visit, and even though trains still run on the line we were able to walk across the bridge and take photo's - trains don't move very fast in Thailand and not very regularly!That night we stayed on a river house on the river Kwai which was really cool. We returned to Bangkok the following day to collect our visa's and after a quite night we had a 6am start the following day for our trip across the Cambodian border.
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