One night in Bangkok

We got a tuk tuk to the Phnom Penh airport this morning after checking out of our hotel. We were sad to leave Cambodia, but excited for another country and another culture. Outside of the airport was very busy with lots of locals dropping people off and picking people up. But once inside (I think you need to be a travelling passenger to even get inside the airport) it was cool and quiet. We had no problems checking into our short Thai Airways flight to Bangkok, and were quite impressed with the level of security at the Cambodian airport. We were relieved to note that all bags are weighed, scanned, and marked as scanned by airport security before being loaded onto the airplane. We didn't expect any dramas but we couldn't help but think of the young Aussie girl, Chantelle, who was recently busted in Bangkok for bringing in a large amount of marijuana (which she swears is not hers) and who is now in a Thai prison for life and is facing the death penalty. We didn't expect the $25US each airport charge that we had to pay before going through customs, but we had just enough cash to pay for it and we knew there would be some ATM's in the Bangkok airport.

We arrived in Bangkok around 11:30 a.m., less than an hour after take-off. We got through immigration quickly and walked right through customs. We tried to save some money by catching a bus into the city, but having failed that, we went to catch a train. As the train was another 1.5 hours from departing (our book said they leave frequently), we tooke the whimpy way out and caught a taxi (it was incredibly hot walking around for over an hour with our packs too). We decided to stay on Khao San road since it's our first time in Bangkok and thought we should experience the backpacker ghetto. We headed straight to a hotel that was highly recommended by more than one person we had asked over the last few weeks, D&D Hotel. It was extremely nice for this area, and extremely out of our price range. After wandering up and down the street, we soon found out that Bangkok is more expensive than we had anticipated. We settled on a clean(ish) place with a fan--no windows, no air-con. We grabbed some lunch, wandered around a bit then got a tuk tuk to the Siam Square area of the city. Since it had been a long day, it was really hot, and Nige had a funny tummy (thanks to some bad prawns), we decided to relax for the evening and saw a movie. We settled on 'Finding Neverland' which was really good. We then had a quick dinner and headed back to our hotel.

It was a long night in our little hot box room, but not as bad as the place in Siem Reap.