Bangkok / Thailand: country number 3 within 24 hours.

We landed at lunchtime and set off to explore; which was a complete failure that I'm going to skip over the whole afternoon except to say that we saw a nice temple and got extremely sweaty.

Wat Suthat

The quiet temple grounds were a welcome change to the noise and heat outside.

Later that same evening – Friday 26 … still - we headed to the infamous grotty-backpacker riddled Khaosan Road for some beer and pad thai from a street cart. The pad thai was delicious, the beer was cool and the street theatre entertaining in its souvenir-wearing loud-mouthing drunkenness. Khaosan Road is it seems a Bangkok institution, though for no positive reasons.

Staring down Kao San Road.

In a stretch of 200m you see every possible cliché about Thailand and negative tourism. There was 'thai massage', hippy pants, cheap baggy singlets, women in 'local' dress hawking all manner of wooden articles and all of it enveloped in a crowd of bronzed barely dressed bogan Aussies, Americans and Brits for whom this is likely to be the high point of their trip. Not our scene, though Jane was persuaded by a street seller to buy a Changi Beer cigarette holder. I think this was proof of how worn-down we were by this stage of the journey. [Actually, it's probably just more proof that I'm a sucker - Jane]

Jane turns away, uninterested in the original-design singlets.

The best part of the day.