Bangkok, for a final time

Picking up where I left off, we left our accommodation in Kanchaniburi on a motorbike, with a little sidecar bit. Who knew that you could fit 5 people, 4 big bags and 4 small bags on a motorbike! Jim was buried under a bag, Hamish under that and Heidi riding pillion with the driver so it seemed that I was the only one who found the ride pretty comfortable.

Luckily it was only about a 6 minute trip so we all made it in one piece. We grabbed our tickets for the train, which is a continuation of the Death Rail service that we’d been on the day before (and the day before that travelling from Bangkok). Again, it was a ‘stop at all stations’ service, but this time with the added fun of rain! So we kept opening and closing the windows as the showers came through – do we want to stay cool by keeping the windows open, or stay dry by keeping them shut? Depends on how hard the rain is falling as it turned out.

We arrived back in Bangkok in the early evening, and jumped in a car to our hotel, which was only around 15 minutes away. After we’d checked in, we popped out for some dinner. As we’re back in the old part of town it’s pretty touristy so there were many options available. As always, we’re trying to accommodate Hamish, and surprisingly there are many options – but not always the ones we’d go for if we were a bunch of ‘Thai food eaters’ only.

On that note, Hamish has managed to spend 6 weeks in Asia without eating a single Asian dish. He did branch out to roti a couple of times (with either chocolate or nutella…) but otherwise, managed to dodge it completely.

For our last full day in Bangkok we decided to tackle the only public transport option we hadn’t yet tried which was the ferry service up and down the river.

The closest ferry stop to us was just a short walk away, and for around $1 each, we got on a ferry to travel up the river to a massive shopping centre, ICONSIAM.

The ferry was reasonably easy to work out, but like the trains, there are different ones that have different processes. Identified by flags, the orange, yellow and red ones are more like commuter, or express services, and then there is a blue one which is a ‘hop on hop off’ type service, mainly for tourists.

We went on the yellow and orange ones and found them really comfortable, albeit that we were guessing a bit as to where they might stop. Fortunately, on the way up it stopped straight outside the shopping centre so that worked well for us.

Normally we’d rather poke our eyes out with a burning stick than spend hours in a shopping centre, but this one turned out to be both enormous, and very interesting. One of the first things we saw was a huge ‘sausage dog’, I’d guess around 15 metres long. It looked extremely realistic (except for its size of course), and it was sleeping, but was ‘breathing’ and moving its ears every now and again. Hard to explain, but it was really cool.

We somehow spent many hours in this shopping centre, so by the time we left we caught the ferry back to our initial stop. We ended up getting off one stop early as Jim wanted to walk over a huge bridge, so we did that, then ended up at the hotel about 15 minutes later.

After a bit of a rest, we headed out for dinner and to the markets on Khao San Road, which was about a 12 minute walk. There wasn’t much we needed, but we did grab a t-shirt each and some elephant pants for Heidi. We then grabbed a streetside table in a restaurant for a couple of drinks and some bar food to mark our final night in Thailand.

This morning we’ve had a quiet time as we prepare to leave for the airport. The kids have been collecting the coins as we’ve gone along, so they exchanged those at the local 7-11 for a whole lot of lollies, which seemed to please them both.

All packed for the final time, I think we’re all ready to head home, back to the dog and our own beds. I’ll do a wrap up post in a week or so, and hopefully add in some photos once I’m back in my little office and can hopefully work out whatever is going on with my computer.

The kids are excited about watching movies on the plane all night – I’m pretty sure they’ll be asleep before we take off for the second flight, but we’ll see!

Thanks for your hospitality Thailand, it’s been great!

Edit: The second flight was a nightmare for me. About 3 hours in I started becoming violently ill. We’re blaming it on a dodgy sandwich in Bangkok airport. It was a very long and traumatic trip home for me, although the Singapore Airlines staff did their best to look after me. I got off the plane and into a wheelchair for the arduous journey through customs and immigration, then spent the best part of two days in bed. 🙁