Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2057801&l=20629&id=1101094
I arrived in
My few days in Bangkok were really quite uneventful—I spent my days reading by the pool, my evenings sampling the Thai cuisine which I seemingly never grow tired of, and my nights wandering Khao San Road, which is a tourist attraction in itself. I would attempt to describe Khao San Road to you in a long paragraph of colorful language, but instead I’ll just quote what I overheard one British guy say to another that sums it all up quite nicely: “Man, if we can’t take down any of these bitches, we’re getting whores!”
You’re probably asking why I spent any time in Bangkok at all—after all, I was there a few different times last year, and if I was looking to get off the tourist track, Bangkok certainly wasn’t the place to do it. But the fact is that with tourists come tourist services, such as travel agencies that can procure visas. I needed a visa to visit Vietnam, and Bangkok was by far the easiest place to get it.
I did play tourist for one day while I was in Bangkok and took a riverboat to visit the two most famous temples in the city. Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and Wat Pho (site of a giant Reclining Buddha) were beautiful, but, as the saying goes, once you’ve seen one Buddhist temple you’ve seen them all. Plus, both temples were crawling with tourists, which didn’t help anything. Perhaps the highlight of the day was watching Thai monks take pictures in front of one of the temples. Huh? I snapped a few photos of my own and moved on.
Tuesday evening after I got my passport back (with my Vietnam visa in it) I headed for the bus station, where I’d catch the same overnight bus to Chiang Mai that I had three months before. I put all my warm clothes on and covered myself with blankets, and, as expected, it still wasn’t enough. I arrived in Chiang Mai a block of ice.
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