Bangkok Daze

We've arrived!

We had possibly the smoothest flight and airport experience ever resulting in arriving at Pia & Sebi's apartment in Bangkok at 6am and getting them out of bed. Anyway, after a few tea's we headed out into town. Em has been here a few times before but this is my first time in SE Asia. Combined with lack of sleep, I found the first few hours quite intense. So much traffic, noise and stifling heat although they tell me it was quite a cool day. Anyway, we checked out a wat (temple) and had lunch at the local village.


The highlight for me was catching the water taxi which flies along the canals at high speed. Customers are required to pull on a rope / pulley system to hold up a tarp to ensure you don't get a face full of Bangkok canal water. The boat is too high to go under some of the bridges, but the guys here have developed a system where the roof is folded down like a parallelogram as the bridge is approached (at full speed) and popped back up afterwards. The guys standing up top who do this all wear motorbike helmets which I guess is borne of experience. Anyway, I think this is my first experience of SE Asian ingenuity, although I can't help thinking it might be better to work out a more permanent solution like raise the bridges or lower the boat, still it works and this is a really fast way to get around.

Here's some weird fruit juice Pia gave us, the one on the right is mushroom & honey (we'll send you some back Kym). And here's a tower of beer bigger then Em. It has a core of ice to keep it cool. Someone should really think about doing this in Australia.


It's been really great to catch up with Pia and Sebi, no idea what we're going to get up to today...hmmm it looks hot outside.