Un-Thaid

As this trip has progressed our early ports of call have begun to feel an age away while at other times we can't believe that three months have already flown by. Whether we like it or not however this post (albeit rather short and photo-light), marks the halfway point for bamrtw and we can't help but feel it's downhill from here. After twelve weeks in hot, polluted Asian cities we head next to beautiful Sydney for the middle of the Australian winter. For the first time on the trip we will fly south of the Equator and, having just about gotten used to being an object of curiosity and/or a mark wherever we go, are looking forward to the anonymity of countries which, while further from the US than ever, will be more familiar than anything we have seen to date.

Before heading down under though there's time for this last missive from Thailand - the so-called "Land of Smiles."

We flew back into Bangkok, still glowing from our fantastic experience in Vietnam, quite late at night and postponed our arrival into the city proper when our unsuccessful attempt to avoid an expensive cab ride saw us spend the early hours of our first day circling the airport complex on a baggage handlers' shuttle bus. As we felt we knew the city fairly well after our first two visits when we finally arrived we headed to our usual hotel only to find that it was full. This was the first time this had happened to us and given the number of places in the vicinity we weren't too worried - at least until we'd woken up another four receptionists to be grumpily informed that they too were out of space. Wondering if there was some sort of holiday on that we didn't know about I volunteered to leave my bag with Megan at our most recent strike-out and see if I could find anything else down one of the narrow, underlit alleyways nearby.

Since our first day in Thailand we had joked about the policemen who, while numerous and visible, seemed to share an obsession with having every spare milimeter of fabric tailored out of their clothes. The result is that most of them look more like male strippers in 'police uniforms' than the cops we are more used to seeing and up until that night we had found them far from intimidating. There's something about 2a.m. and a lack of streetlights though which meant there was nothing funny about the two policemen who suddenly appeared out of the darkness and demanded I freeze! The sad fact is that bagless Brits stumbling around Bangkok that early in the morning are usually probably up to no good but after a quick frisk down my new friends decided I didn't pose an immediate threat and let me go. No longer in the mood to be picky we found a room a street away from Khao San a short while later and crashed.

A Thai policeman - a serious threat to lost Englishmen and weak seams:

Khao San road, if you've seen "The Beach," is where Robert Carlyle first accosts Leo DiCaprio and for better or worse has been the hub around which most backpackers have based their Indochinese adventures for 25 years. Although this was our first visit it was obvious that the area was gentrifying very fast; boutique hotels outnumber the true flophouses, everyone speaks English and there's even a Starbucks nestling in next to the pad thai and fake DVD sellers! We felt a little out of place amongst the western crowd which seemed to be a three-way mix of middle-aged hippies back with their teenage children, college students in search of cheap drinks and full-moon parties and the 'real travellers' doing their best to make clear they're only there briefly en route to Cambodia or Laos. Unfortunately however our gastronomic excesses in Hanoi had given Megan our first bout of traveller's tummy so we decided to make the best of it, relax and start thinking about Australia.

In between regular infusions of street food and fantasizing about the imminent cold weather we did manage to knock off two of the major Bangkok sights which had eluded us on previous visits. On our second day we visited the sprawling Grand Palace complex which featured more of the spectacular architecture we'd seen at Wat Pho but on an even more impressive scale. One of the highlights was the emerald Buddha (made of jade), which is Thailand's most revered relic. We also saw (but were not allowed to photograph), several of the cermonial thrones which are used in Thai coronations and state celebrations.

The next day we braved the weekend market which features over 10,000 stalls and is apparently the largest open air market in the world. Open air is probably misleading as most of the stalls were arranged along tiny roofed alleyways which we had a lot of fun exploring. Highlights were definitely the puppy market, finally finding a reasonably priced second hand bookseller and stumbling across a stall run by the Blue Mountain Boys - surely Thailand's only Western Bluegrass band.

So that's it!

• we're halfway through, have caught 11 flights without a delay and, shockingly, we've only lost 2 books, a T-shirt and a fleece between us
• despite lofty ambitions and six-months off work we still haven't read any of the classics
• we've developed a deep aversion to jungles
• we've found that cheap countries are not as cheap as they are supposed to be but this can be offset if you are the only one of your friends to have given up their well-placed apartment
• we've so far travelled over 29,000 miles and visited 9 countries (one of them communist) but by far the most stressful and maddeningly illogical government agency we've encountered was US customs
• we have learnt that the word for "bottle" in Vietnam is the same as the word for "man" so until you have the accent sorted it is important to take stock of where you are before ordering
• we have eaten every variety of dodgy street food we could find across three different continents and the only time either of us gotten ill was the day after we tried cooking for ourselves
• we're having the time of our lives and we're still married!

P.S. in a hopeless attempt to delay our return to work we have allowed google to 'monetize' this site which explains the ads you will not have noticed at the very bottom of the blog. These ads appear to change depending on where we log on from - presumably in an attempt to tailor themselves to the readership. We just wanted to make it clear that we did not condone or approve this message: