Bangkok for Xmas!

Devin on Khoa San Road

We flew to Bangkok on Chistmas Eve, which felt very luxurious compared to the buses we had been taking in Vietnam. We headed to Khoa San, the backpacker area of the city and where there are tons of bars, restaurants, hotels and street vendors. We wanted a nice place to spend the holidays so we splurged on a hotel on the main street with a roof top pool overlooking the neighbourhood. We had sure missed phad thai while we were away (from Thailand), so we grabbed some for lunch then had to shop around for a hotel reservation for New Year's in Koh Pha Ngan which was a little difficult (Koh Pha Ngan is where they have the full moon parties and roughly 30,000 people head to the beach for a party). We had to go to about six different travel agents to get a reservation - people generally book months in advance.

Dev at Christmas Light Display

After settling that, we chilled out until night fall so that we could go downtown to do a Christmas light walking tour that we had read about. They don't technically celebrate Christmas in Thailand, but they love the shopping and decorations that go with it, so the lights were amazing, especially in the shopping centres! :) At some of the really big hotels too, the Christmas light displays were great, super cheesy too! At one hotel downtown, they had a gingerbread house, reindeer, carolors, the works!

Bangkok Traffic

The walking tour was a little hard to follow, but took us by the big hotels, then across the major shopping centres, finishing at Siam Square. Siam Square is the Dundas Square of Bangkok, but times like a hundred. The square was lit up by palm trees with Christmas lights on them. Bangkok is known for its lifestyle shopping centres and Siam Paragon is crazy! It's like six huge floors of swanky stores with a huge movie theatre at the top and restaurants on the ground floor. There were people everywhere. After checking everything out and getting into the Christmas spirit, we took on the incredible challenge of trying to find a taxi back to our hotel. :)

Rooftop Pool - Christmas Day



Meg at TRON 3-D

The next day was Christmas and was a little different than back home. We started off the day in the rooftop pool. :) After breakfast, we headed to Chatuchuk market for some Christmas shopping. This weekend market has thousands of stalls and was great to wander around. It ended up to be largely a locals market though, so we didn't end of getting anything, but there were loads of stuff that we would have loved to be able to bring home with us! Cowboy boots, huge leather bags, loads of clothes, it was really tempting. We finished up early and took the Skytrain back to Siam Paragon. The Skytrain was really cool, super fast and clean and overlooking the city, would be really cool for Toronto. You could be from Etobicoke to downtown in five minutes, no problem. :) Once back at Siam, we headed up to the theatre to catch TRON IMAX 3-D! We had to get the cashier to explain it to us though, because they have a very complicated price structure where different seats in the theatre cost different prices and its assigned seating! We'd read about this, but were still a little surprised when before the movie, the king's anthem and a video clip came on and everyone in the theatre stood up. They love their king here, there are pictures of him absolutely everywhere, in every restaurant, on the streets, of all ages too. If you see a picture of a baby, it's usually the king 70 years or so ago. :) After the movie, we headed back to Khoa San for sushi Christmas dinner! Dev picked the movie so Meg picked the dinner.

The next morning we were up super early to catch a train to Ayuthaya, a town two hours north of Bangkok that is known for its ancient temple ruins. The town used to be the captial of what would have been Thailand and was surrounded by three rivers converging, so was protected until the Burmese invasion which pushed the capital to Bangkok. We found a cute little guesthouse and rented some bicycles and I dragged Dev all over the city. :)



Ancient Palace Ruins



That's a person standing on its lap!

The temple ruins were amazing, they are all over the city but you have to pay into get inside the larger ones. We visited a few, including the old ancient palace and spent the afternoon biking around. Dev needed to go home for a nap :) so we crashed for an hour or two and then headed out on a boat tour we had booked. Just before dusk, a longtail boat took us around the city to see three more temple sites. The first temple had been largely restored but housed one of the country's largest seated Buddhas, which sounds kind of lame until you actually see it. It was huge! The second site had been partially restored but still had ruins which like a hundred old buddhas surrounding a temple and a huge reclining buddha.

At Last Temple

The boat arrived at the last temple side just as the sun was setting. This is supposedly the most photographed site in the city and it was easy to see why. The temple ruins were on a huge grassy hill with the river in front and the sunset behind. It was really pretty and we managed to get some pictures before our camera battery died. :) I forgot to mention that our room at the guesthouse had the bathroom right in the bedroom with only a half wall seperating them, very strange! :)

Meg at Waterfall In National Park

The next day we were up super early again because we wanted to get to the Khao Yai National Park near Pak Chong. It was like the Amazing Race trying to get out there, because we had no idea where we were going, but we figured it out. We took a train to Pak Chong in the morning, then a local bus (a truck with benches in the back) to a guesthouse we had read about. Then we quickly had lunch and got back on the bus (which you wave down on the highway) to the park in lots of time! :) There we rented a motorbike (scooter) but they only had a manual bike, so Dev had to learn how to drive it pretty quickly, a bit of a rough ride at first! :) The park was enormous and really beautiful but the trails were not well marked and hard to find, so we drove around mostly to check out a bunch of the waterfalls and lookout points. We didn't see any wild elephants, cobras or tigers (thank goodness!) but did see loads of gibbons (tree monkeys) and wild deer.

Meg at National Park Viewpoint

The ride home was super chilly but we made it and grabbed dinner at the hotel. The old ladies there were great cooks and one was really funny. Dev asked if he could have some garlic bread and she sad no, then yes in a 'Night at the Roxbury' kind of way. So we waited for a while thinking there was garlic bread coming before I went up again to ask. She said the same to me, but then I asked again and realized she didn't know how she sounded and there was no garlic bread. It was really funny. :)

We had our last really early morning the next day to head back to Bangkok. We got a room on the sixth floor (lots of stairs) of a hotel near the train station. We had a quiet day and night and the next morning explored Chinatown before getting on our night bus to Koh Pha Ngan for New Year's!