Bangkok

After spending the last 2 weeks on a beach, we were ready to hit the big city and get to some nice, clean, cheap air conditioned rooms!

We were a little nervous heading into Bangkok, knowing about all the red shirt protesting going on, but had asked around lots on the situation before going, it sounded like the protesting was limited to certain areas of the city, thankfully, not near the Khao San backpacker area where we had planned to stay. We did find out they were at one of the biggest shopping areas where we had wanted to visit, so had to cancel those plans and limit our shopping to Khao San Road.

We spent most of our time here just walking around buying t-shirts, having some beers at night, and visited the Grand Palace (lots of really nice temples and the King’s Palace). The dress code restrictions here were pretty strict (must cover elbows to knees...in 36 degree heat!) , so Kendra and Kyle ended up having to borrow some nice clothing (you’ll see Kyle’s karate pants in the pictures, and Kendra’s skin-toned dress shirt), haha. Made for some good pictures anyways.

One thing we really noticed was how much the red shirt protesting is hurting tourism in Thailand...especially Bangkok. While we didn’t see any red shirts ourselves, we noticed Khao San was DEAD – eerily quiet compared to what it normally is. And people in the tourism industry are trying even harder to make a buck, i.e, trying out every scam in the book. Normally, tuk tuk drivers (small motorbike taxis) are known to try and pull a scam, telling you the Palace is closed, but they’ll take you to some jewellery shop where you can buy really cheap gems. We have read about this scam in every travel guide, so generally avoided tuk tuks all together and used metered taxis. Only this time, even the metered taxis were trying the same scams! Needless to say, we felt like every cab we got into we were somehow going to get ripped off. The drivers were desperate to make some extra cash.

On our last day in Bangkok, we were sitting on our rooftop pool and noticed the skyline of Bangkok had turned ugly. This was the day all the fires had been set by the protestors, so black smoke clouds in every direction. We headed out for one last dinner, and found out a city wide curfew had been set for 8pm. Our flight out was just after midnight, so thought we should just try and get a cab and get to the airport early, didn’t want to risk not making it there. On our way back to the hotel to quickly pack everything we saw most of the shops were closing up and the streets were nearly deserted. Was very creepy scene for a normally extremely busy area. We knew it was time to get out of the city! So, on that note, it was a good feeling to be leaving Bangkok (even though we had a long wait at the airport). We were looking forward to heading to Bordeaux for some good wine 