Day 10: Mon 25th Oct 2010 – Bangkok

We did not welcome the coming of our first morning in Bangkok. The Chang consumption of the previous night had left us both feeling a little worse for wear. Eventually we dragged ourselves out of bed and got ready for a day in the capital of Thailand. The main thing to see in the city is the Grand Palace and it looked like it was about 3km our hostel. As people who like a good walk this didn't seem like too great a distance so we set out with various maps of the city. It took all of about 5 minutes to realise that the map which had so little detail (only showing major roads) would not be much help. After about an hour of walking hoping we were going in the right direction we managed to find one of the roads on the map that we could follow to the palace.

The streets of Bangkok are like no other city I've been before. All the shops seem to be grouped into districts, so one minute you pass tens of shops all changing car tyres, then a row of identical plumbing shops, then maybe a shops selling coffins and so on. These shops are very unglamorous with space used to a maximum, most interesting are the car part shop which just have huge piles of oily hunks of metal in every space available. Due to the over crowding if the shops all business is conducted on the pavement or even the road which makes walking all the more difficult as you have to weave around some metal being cut or a car wheel being changed.

About two hours into the walk my GPS on my phone finally found a satellite and was able to point us in the right direction. En-route we passed an outdoor gym in a park (very cool), a temple which we went in and had a look and were amused that half of it was now a tacky gift shop and we also started to encounter the scams. Bangkok seems too be a hive of scammers from what we had read. The number one scam being Thais saying things were closed as it was a Buddhist holiday. As we grew close to the Palace we started to experience exactly what had been described. A apparent university professor who taught English but didn’t seem to speak it amazingly well told us the Palace was closed for a Holiday. A short distance later we were told the ministry of defence had closed the road to the palace but there was a different route we could take. Then a bit further on a man approached to let us know we wouldn't get into the palace in what we were wearing.

It wasn't too much surprise to use that the palace was open and we got in fine. I wont say too much about the palace grounds except the architecture was stunning, the buildings were all in pristine condition and there was a very peaceful vibe around the place, the pictures will say the rest.