Bangkok, Thailand

Well, you might say this place has a reputation.  And we’d probably tell you that from what we could see peeking around corners, its reputation is well deserved.

We took a 12 hour night bus from Krabi to get here and our sleep schedules never really recovered.  Each night we’d set an ambitious agenda for the next day, “get a Myanmar visa, book flights, visit something cool”.  But each day we would rise later and later, catching only an hour or three of sunlight.  As it turns out Bangkok is as fun by night as it is by day, so we cast our watches aside in favor of a fork and spoon and set off to eat our way through this vast metropolis.

Daniel and Nina happened to be coming through so for two great nights we convened and took Khao San Road, at least the PG version, by storm.  We bid them a sad fairwell and found ourselves alone once again.

Next we visited Locke, my long time friend and now resident English teacher here in the Big Mango.  We set a time and redied ourselves for a veritable ‘best of Bangkok’ the next day.  Locke used his impressive Thai languague skills to addict us to pygmy coconuts and find our way around, we used our travel savvy to sniff out authentic treasures and back alley eats.

After hours of laughing, a few temples, lots of food, and too many miles for our aching feet we ended up in the nicest mall we’ve ever seen (and that’s coming from a SoCal girl).  Locke after the nostalgia of seeing us craves a burrito and sure enough the mall had a burrito stands.  Sometimes the tastes of home are the only path to satisfaction.

Despite the best efforts of the skilled and persistent hawkers, the mind numbing haze of food spicy enough to fuel a car, and a sleep schedule that kept us dreaming all the time – we made it out of Bangkok with our wallets intact.  However, we did drop a few chunks of change and mercifully indulged in a few key wardrobe upgrades – Sasa your prayers have been answered!

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Scott Dusek is a writer and photography originally from Seattle, Washingon.

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