Khao San

Hey everyone. We've moved to another guesthouse in the very bustling Kaosan road region. The atmosphere here is completely different to the old place. For starters it's cranking 24/7. It's the main area in Banglamphu and it's the most crowded. The street we're on is lined with guesthouses, all of which have bars that sprawl out onto the street. There are excellent food vendors here, and just about anything you might want to buy will eventually be rolled up to you on a cart of some variety.

This is the best meal I've had so far. It's pork with garlic and lemongrass and all kinds of things. So damn tasty. We've gone through all the favourites, pad thai (I think they just call it pad here in case you were wondering Jeremy), seafood fried rice, tom yum. And the snacks, oh god the snacks. I had this cluster of deep-fried prawns for desert one evening and that was espescially good for a post-dinner treat.


Very educational signs on guesthouses have taught us that there's this tuk-tuk scam about in which drivers will say that they'll take you ANYWHERE YOU WANT for 10baht, except you have to induge him on one stop. This stop happens to be at a tacky jewellery / tailor store. Also there are GANGSTERS about that want you to go visit the temple with them so that they can then sell you a bunch of services that they won't actually provide/you didn't want anyway. We encountered both these things and thanks to the poorly written signs were able to stay clear. A couple of other travellers we met weren't so lucky and were treated to what I hear was an excellent store selling perfectly-crafted garments and gemns the likes of which they have never seen in the western world.

By day the streets are packed with stalls and people looking for bargains, and tables and chairs where you can eat your vendor purchased meals. By night it becomes a street-long bar area with make-shift bar carts showcasing their alocholic beverage selections. One sign read 'VERY VERY STRONG COCKTAILS" and another "FUCKING GOOD BEER". Once we had our fill of that for the night we treated to our guesthouse bar where the music started off with chill-out mixes and ended with some pretty offensive throwbacks from eurodance classics circa 1995. We played backgammon (it's like an old, analogue, wooden version of Starcraft as I understand it) and checkers while drinking cheap beer and whiskey. Then all of a sudden this baby elephant came by so I pat him for a bit.

Bangkok is pretty intense and although our four days here have been really great we're heading out to an island to hang out on the beach for a while. We've booked a boat tomorrow morning to head over to Ko Samet. Really looking forward to checking that place out, I've heard really good things and it's exciting heading anywhere we've never been. I'm expecting seafood.

This is what I had for breakfast today. Something involving pork, rice, and the biggest prawn I've ever consumed. One of the amusing highlights from the nightlife was a bar packed with foreigners singing along to this Thai acoustic guitarist / singer who was doing sing-a-long friendly covers of classics such as The Final Countdown and Umbrella. Hearing his female Thai backup singer yell "ella.. ech.. ech.. ech" was beautiful in its own special, piercing way. There's this radical dude sitting at the reception behind us wearing a bandana chatting up the receptionist. He just asked her for her name and now he's sort of working that, what time she finishes her shift, how she's going to be out partying out with them tonight, and her occupation into a horrible drunken song that he's belting out on an acoustic guitar he's just purchased. Funny stuff.

Yesterday there was this drunk hippie dude chatting up these two girls and he asked if he could smoke some of their shisha. The one-sided conversation that ensued was Curb Your Enthusiasm levels of awkward for the two girls.