Here’s your latest, thrilling installment in the mini-series known as ‘Sarah and Ian Really Need A Shower’.
We bade Bangkok a fond farewell this morning and headed for the former Thai capital of Ayutthaya, where we visited the ruins of what once were very grand temples. Very impressive, but the sun was scorching hot and our rucksacks seemed to be getting heavier by the minute.
From there, we continued north on the train to Lop Buri, where hundreds of monkeys roam free, hang from the power lines, shit on car windscreens, and basically have free reign of the town. These anarchic simian terrorists are very entertaining, until they decide to mob you and you’re suddenly spinning around in circles, trying to throw several monkeys off your back! A local guy followed us around with a catapult (slingshot), as a visual deterrent, which seemed to do the trick nicely.
It’s now 20:10 and we’ve just had dinner, which consisted of several soft drinks, bottles of water, two main dishes and two desserts, all for the knock down price of just under $4. And to think that Laos will make all of this seem expensive!
We have a couple of hours to kill before our night train to Chiang Mai in the north of the country. We’re grimy and sweaty, but it’ll be tomorrow before we can wash away today’s grit.
Yesterday, we took a really cool river boat up to Bang Yai, on the outskirts of Bangkok. This was real picture postcard stuff, complete with images of ramshackle waterlogged teak houses (more like huts), naked toddlers bathing in brown river water and ancient ladies wearing straw hats and paddling along in low-lying boats full of vegetables (more how I expected Vietnam to look than Thailand, but there you go).
Other things we did yesterday were a visit to Lumphini Park, two more massages (one more traditional Thai at the Wat Pho School of Massage, and an oriental foot massage in the evening — these places are great; you can get a massage at midnight if you want; Bangkok, more than any other place I’ve ever been, simply never sleeps). Oh yes, by the way, the total price of the four hours of massage we’ve each had so far? A mere $20. Yes, $5 per hour is all it costs here. Even Google can’t beat that with its subsidised massages for the staff.
To finish up the day, we went to the district that’s famous for cheap guest-houses and foreign back-packers. It was worth a look, but we have no desire to hang out with a bunch of Brits and eat Western food, so we didn’t hang around for long.
We’ve already crammed so much into our few days over here that it feels like we’ve been here a week. It’s hard to imagine that it’s only Tuesday.
The weather is a little on the hot side (and this is the ‘cool’ season, but it will be cooler in the north of the country), the food is fantastic (although even I had to pass up the salted snake heads today), and the feeling of adventure is only getting greater, now that we’re leaving the best-known city in the area behind and entering into less well-trodden territory. The real adventure will begin when we cross into Laos several days from now.
That’s all for this time. We need to go and stock up on mineral water and catch our train. Hopefully, we’ll get a good night’s sleep in our berths and awake tomorrow, ten hours later in Chiang Mai.