Bye Bye Bangkok

So this will be my last entry from Bangkok, for a while at least. I'm heading off to Thailands second city, Chiang Mai in the far north of the country. Chiang Mai serves as a launching point for treks into the jungle, rafting, lion taming (only joking) and other such rugged outdoor manly persuits.

I decided to use one of the thousand+ agents in Bangkok to handle the booking of travel and acomodation for me. There is a national travel agency like ABTA called TAT (Thailand Authority for Travel?) and as long as agenst have a licence from them you should be ok.

They in turn booked me on a flight offered by the local version of Easyjet, a canary yellow airline called One Two Go! The fee for a one way flight, the princely sum of 29 GBP, not forgetting the airport tax from this LPG, green fuel friendly country just 1.25GBP. I could have travelled for less than half that on the overnight train however that would take over 12 hours while the flight is 90 minutes.

So what are my thoughts on Bangkok? It's a suprisingly clean city, with every street based businessman rising at 6.30am to scrub the whole pavement outside his or her business - try getting London shop keepers to do that!

It's also a city that perhaps tries a little too hard, its hectic 24 hour party and shoping culture and continued touting of everything under the sun from Tuk Tuks and Taxis to ping pong shows and "boom-boom" can quickly wear you down.

However with hindsight it would be an excelent base form which to set out on a number of excursions - to the floating market, to the bridge on the river Kwai, to the summer palace etc and then return to Chinatown for dinner at an upmarket restaurant. Perhaps I'll try this approach on my homeward leg.

So here are some final images of the big city: (I will add more later but this connection is soooo sloooow)

the strange white elephant, revolving clock roundabout??

The bankrupt Shell franchise, hastily converted into a night cafe
The independence monument
The poverty, even on the Kho San, amidst the fast paced trading

Next: Jungle Trekking in Chiang Mai