For you special morning price

Sawasdee from Thailand.

Well we’re having a pretty relaxing time here in Thailand – lounging around and drinking cocktails 🏖️ 🍹. After landing in Bangkok after our very long trip, we were pleased we’d paid a little bit more for a very comfortable apartment with a kitchen, plenty of room, a nice pool and close to bars and restaurants. I picked an area that said it was lively but was not a backpacker area - Sukhumvit. What it was, in fact, was a not quite red light district but definitely a bit seedy, popular with middle-aged and older European men.  In fact, I was one of the few non-Thai females we saw at all during the 7 days. Male tourists made up about 95% of the tourists! The bars all have lots of young Thai women outside encouraging you in. They then chat with the men, play pool/cards/connect four with them (they love their games in bars & restaurants over here), and encourage them to buy them a drink (which was the most expensive on the menu). The premise being you’re ‘paying’ for their company. The drinks must have been largely water given how many the girls were consuming night after night with no ill affects!!! Funnily enough, Trap wasn’t chatted up at all with me in tow 😁.

 

The other weird thing is that dope is now legal over here and there are shops/cafes everywhere, about every 100m and a lot of very stoned looking people sitting outside. In Bangkok and Ko Chang you can smell it everywhere, but in Pattaya and Chiang Mai it is waay less prevalent. Last time I was here, you got life imprisonment for drugs, so it was hard to reconcile the changes – it’s ingrained in my brain. Apparently, the government legalised it and then realised they’d lost control of it and the income from it, and are now trying to put the genie back in the bottle so to speak – good luck with that!

 

Our first night there we popped into the Kicking Donkey – a bar close to our hotel and met an Australian guy, Burnie, who was staying in Bangkok with a friend of his, Michelle about 15 mins from us. We ended up hanging out together for the week which was cool.  

Day three saw the four of us heading to the floating market about 1.5hrs away and onto the train market. Following Vietnam, Bangkok also has a train market with the train going through shops, cafes etc with barely a few cms to spare – was very popular and fun to see. The market was also good and I managed to purchase a couple of blouses and a dress. We sent our winter clothes home, so freed up some more space for shopping 🛍️. Trap’s pleased I can do more shopping as you can imagine 🤣.

 

After replacing Trap’s prescription glasses, which he dropped out of his pocket and then ran over with our suitcase, sending our clothes home and getting a few other admin jobs done, we jumped in a van for the 5-hr trip to Ko Chang in Trat (door to door) which actually ended up being more like  7 hours!!

 

Our hotel on Ko Chang was basic but beachfront and close to bars & restaurants. We loved it here and would definitely return. I headed off diving the next day and despite being rubbish visibility, I was still amazed by the sheer amount of corals and fish there were – swarms of them all around us. You can check out what it’s like in the video below 🤿🐠🐟.

 

Our first dive was on a reef, then we headed off to the wreck of the HTMS Chang. This is Thailand’s largest shipwreck and was intentionally sunk in 2012 to create an artificial reef and dive site. It was originally a US Navy landing ship which served in WWII called the USS Lincoln County before it was sold to the Royal Thai Navy and spent 50 years as a transport vessel before its sinking. It’s ~100m long, sits in about 30m depth so it's very accessible. We went inside the cargo hold but it was pretty large and the visibility was terrible so you couldn’t see much except holes in the floor going into the next hold down until all of a sudden the roof appeared above me! Going single file through the door into the bridge and then out of the wreck to start our safety stops. Our third  dive of the day was another reef which was again packed with fish and corals. There was plenty to see at 5m so it would have been good for snorkelling also.

I could hardly move the next day – a bit out of practice – ha ha 😂, so had a rest day before heading out diving again. Another great day of diving, but the pics don’t do it justice.

 

After a couple of days of exploring locally, we headed off to Pattaya for a few days – another 5 hour van ride later and we arrived at our apartment. A nice place and very lively host (not sure if he was always this jovial or was on something??) but the hardest bed we’ve ever experienced!

 

We stayed in Jomtien Beach not Pattaya town center and I’m glad that we did as the town center resembled Bangkok a bit, whereas Jomtien was very relaxed with a long sandy beach, cafes, restaurants and night markets. There are a lot of expatriates living there (mainly retired men) for 6-8 months of the year. We met a few of them – mostly on retirement visas, who have been coming here for years.

 

We’ve just arrived in Chiang Mai for 7 nights before heading to Ko Lanta next for another week on the beach.

 

So จนถึงครั้งต่อไป -Cnt̄hụng khrậng t̀x pị (till next time), เก็บไว้อย่างดี - Kĕb wị̂ xỳāng dī

 

J&T xx