Bangkok, Day 3

A lazy start again today, with a swim and breakfast. I did a little washing in the bath - it's very expensive to wash using the hotel laundry (almost cheaper to buy new clothes), and we haven't found an outside laundry, although I'm sure they exist. This is one of the minor difficulties of a long trip in asia - you really can't wear the same clothes more than once due to the high temperatures.

Street outside our hotel

Wanting a try tailoring for the first time, we chose one of a street full quite close to the hotel, and were greeted warmly by a young man named Pramod. Dom had brought a shirt to copy and I looked through the books to find a suit style that I liked. When the fabric and styles were chosen, he measured us carefully and wrote all of the details down. The actual tailor himself then appeared with a couple of partially made templates of a jacket, which he then fitted properly to me. As it was Saturday, we were asked to come back on Monday afternoon (we paid a third deposit) for a fitting and then the items would all be ready later that evening.

We are very much looking forward to seeing the outcome! There was enough completed work at Pramod's waiting for people to collect that I feel relatively confident. And how did we choose the tailor? He seemed pleasant and helpful and had reasonable prices. We do a lot of things this way - we'll buy from a stall holder we like, even if it costs a little more. You can usually tell when there is no more movement with prices, as their faces genuinely fall and they become less helpful.

The Lebua is the one with the gold dome on top

Hotel pool

To travel around Bangkok, there are many choices. Taxi, motorcycle taxi, skytrain (excellent light rail system running high above the city streets), ferry, tuk-tuk (3 seater motor cycled powered trishaw), and feet. Taxis seem like a poor choice in the traffic that we've seen, and we were warned that the tuk-tuk drivers try to take you to gem houses and jewellers to get their kick backs.

The ferry is quite close to our hotel, so we decided to travel along the river to see some temples. We hopped on a waiting ferry and waited for 10 minutes, watching other tourists use the ferry to board long-tail boats which came up alongside. Eventually we started off and went across the river, where everyone got off! Arggh. We hopped off then to ask where to catch the ferry that went up the river, and were told we had to go back over the other side. We paid $1 each for the ferry crossing, and then hopped back on to wait again. Wanting to move a little faster and deciding that the local ferry would take quite some time to get to our desired stop, about 6 more from our location, we paid the $16 to take a long-tail boat. I had not been worried about the money, rather about being on such a big, busy river in a narrow boat. These were much bigger than the one we rode at the floating markets, and the driver was an expert at slowing when necessary to avoid splashing us over the wake of other boats.

Upon alighting at Wat Pho, the reclining Buddha stop, we found we had to pay a landing charge of 20 baht. It was worth is to be helped from the long tail boat!

(Dom's going to write a little now; his will all be in italics from now on)

The Chao Phraya river is definitely the quickest way to get around, closely followed by the Skytrain. Road travel can be very slow and frustrating. This makes the option of a motorcycle taxi attractive, if potentially dangerous!

After getting off the long tail boat we headed up to the Reclining Buddha temple. This turned out to be closed for the public holiday. A friendly passerby showed us how to get to the open temples on our map and explained the best way to get there - Tuk Tuk. On reflection this may have been a scam as the driver then pleaded with us to take us to a shopping area where he would get "free fuel". By this stage we had had enough of sitting in exhaust fumes and persuaded him to take us, via every back street, to MBK centre for lunch.

We had a great lunch of thai specialities and accompanied by restorative beer, then wandered off through the weekend shopping crowds to Paragon centre. We were trying to get hold of some decent wine and this place has the best stocked food and booze market I've seen in a long time.

My mission was to get some long pants for tonight as the only pair I brought were being cleaned. Our hotel has very strict dress rules to access the bars and restaurants. Men must have collared shirts, long pants and closed in shoes. I think this is to discourage 'Hangover Wannabees' and it seems to work.

Suzy found herself some nice clothes and then we headed back via the Skytrain to our hotel. After a freshen up we travelled up to the top floor (64th)  to take in the night lights of Bangkok. The view from the top is fantastic; you can see for miles in every direction as the city is quite flat. It was, however, quite windy with a lot of people in a small bar area with standing area only so we went to the bar on the 52nd floor for cocktails. Much more relaxing!