Bangers & Flash

Well... We have arrived in Bangkok (Bangers), and are flashing it up in true flashpacker style :)
The daily budget of 900 Baht each (AU$30) is looking like a very unlikely dream at the moment!
We arrived at about 11:30pm, and caught a taxi, which proved to its astonished passengers that Einstein's special theory of relativity is in fact wrong..... It is possible for an object to travel faster than the speed of light (and not hit things..... just..... very, very, only just).
We found it so hard to explain the location of the guest house we wanted to the taxi driver, even after he called the farrang service (English Thai translation call centre), that we ended up staying on Khao San road - the backpackers’ ghetto. Fun for all the family! So the next morning we got up early, which wasn't hard as we didn’t sleep a wink (it’s hard on Khao San, but more on that later), and moved to Tavee Guest House, in the Thawet district. I cannot recommend this place enough, it’s a beautiful Thai style wooden house frequented by long term farrang residents on visa runs and life long travelers, 100m from the Chao Prya River, down a quiet, leafy Soi (side street).

Which brings me to why we didn't sleep..... Being back in Bangers is reviving long lost memories of traveling, like:

1. Roosters don't just crow in the morning as the myth suggests, they do it all night, right outside our window by the sound of it. And that sets to dogs off..... And there are a lot of dogs in Bangers (well, the whole of Thailand really).
2. Khao San road is a hole... a hole filled with drunken wankers with Thai "girlfriends", rip off artists, people who think getting their hair braided is cool, roosters, dogs, dog shit, and all night bars.
3. The amazing toilet shower: A large toilet cubicle with a shower at one end. Now I didn't forget about these, and don't particularly have anything against them (they work really well, you can use the shower to spray the cubicle off if it's dirty etc etc), but I did forget all the usage tips I found out last time I was here: put the toilet seat down first, as things can fall down the toilet easily (note to self: buy new towel), and make sure your clothes are hung up properly or they will fall on the toilet floor (yum).

Bitching aside, I am having a great time. We have done most of our chores (bought supplies, got injections etc), so now we are free to travel down to the islands, or wherever we like. We also met a couple of travelers at Tavee (Cataline;Belgium and Mike;Canada) who live in Thailand (in Kanchanaburi – where the bridge over the River Kwai is) who have invited us to their place for a couple of days.

Basically we are having a ball. Its sunny and hot, the food is great and cheap, and so is the beer (which is sold everywhere), and we soon be kicking back on a tropical paradise island.