Prebs and Goose Wander Loose: Never trust a fart in South East Asia

Or so we had heard.

Let the culture begin, arriving in Bangkok, whisking through customs and a hair raising taxi ride to Khao San Rd we were into it!

We arrived at Khao San Rd at 11pm at night… On a Saturday… Talk about a culture shock... Being 2am Melbourne time (4am NZ time), and hung over, tired, dehydrated, in 30 degrees plus the humidity, surrounded by the masses. We were not expecting it. But we made it to our accommodation (cheap accommodation), dropped our bags and went and got amongst..

There were scorpions for sale, ping pong shows being shouted out, tattoo parlours, drunk poms and all round chaos.

Gold Buddha

View of all the houses built on stilts next to the river.

Market on the way to Kanchanaburi. We bought a bunch on bananas for $5 Baht (20c). They also sold all sorts of meats here... the smell reminded me a bit of the meat works...

Me and Nick on the Kanchanaburi bridge. The river looked good enough to swim in, especially in the 35 degree heat!! However we refrained (only just...) when we smelt the river down at the river side restaraunts.

Kanchanaburi bridge with the train coming.

This was taken on the other side of the river at this crazy Chinese Buddha temple.

Lucy on the train to the Cambodian border. The train took 6 hrs and cost $2...

GETTING HUSTLED IN BANGKOK

Day 1…. Fuck. Looking back we totally got scammed. But hey, these things happen…
So we were walking along this street after having just spent an hour or so at the Thai Museum (epic by the way). This guy approached us and sold us this river deal to go see the floating markets, fish ponds.. the whole works etc. We were planning on doing this today so we went along… A Tuk Tuk picked us up, took us 200m (gutted we paid for this…) then we hopped on a private river boat.
It was a cool experience going on the boat, taking you through the Bangkok canals. But we didn’t see any floating market (only one lady selling shame stuff) and no fish pond (only people feeding fish…).
Oh well. Live and learn.

Time to get street smart..
To combat the heat and constantly trying to be ripped off Nick cut off the beard, a shared street meal at lunch and consuming more water was in order. A tuk tuk ride to the main sights was a good start to the morning, then it was off to a suit factory – good luck trying to get prebs to fork out for a suit. They failed, much to our drivers disgust he even dicided to ditch us at the last temple didn’t worry us as we hadn’t paid him – his loss.

After a brief but heavy down pour and a quick swim we headed to the Royal Palace. The 500 baht price tag and hords of chinese bus tours put us off so we gapped it back to the pool to contemplate the following days activities. Kanchanaburi railway was decided upon so with an early morning tuk tuk ride and a quick look through some traditional markets (ducks feet and all) it was on a rickety old train.

The bridge was built by US prisoners of war in WW2 (prisoners of the Japs). 770 men built a railway connecting Bangkok to Burma in sweltering conditions. Over half the men lost their lives due to disease, malnutrition or maltreatment.

The day was a great adventure but stiffeling hot so when we found out the return train had been delayed it was time for plan B a local bus. We made it pool side just on dark (1x 4 hr bus ride + 1x 1 hr city bus ride later).

Travelling we thought was all about sleeping in late and relaxing so it was a shock to find out the train to the cambodian boarder left at 5.55am meaning a 5am checkout! The train left in a fantastic show of thunder and lightening and buckets of rain, took 7 hours and cost $1.80. The stories about scammers at the boarder had us on edge but a little common sense and a big bunch of tourists soon put the shits up the tuk tuk drivers. Piling into the back of a truck with the encouragement of a very little old lady and we were off to navigate the shifty, corrupt Thai/Cambodian border...