Oh. My. God.

So this is Bangkok! Organised chaos is the way it was described to me by a fellow Aussie I met at the airport and on reflection now I reckon that is a pretty accurate description.

I might as well start at the beginning.

We touched down and the first observation I made was that for a country that hangs people for drug trafficking, customs was remarkably painless to get through. You can almost understand why people are prepared to take the risk, the lady at customs had no intention in the world of checking our bags - must have been too close to knock off time.

The second immediate observation that we made was the humidity. We walked out of the airport to meet our hotel transfer, and I am not joking, you can almost eat the air in this place. It was still at least 28 degrees with driving rain and thunderstorms. Mix that with the pollution here and you get an atmosphere you feel like you are swimming through rather than walking through.

So anyway, we get into this crappy old minivan with a couple of other blokes from Adelaide and headed for the hotel. No seat belts, optional road rules and an absolutely amazing amount of traffic (and we're talking 11:00pm Saturday night) made for an interesting journey. We saw no less than 3 traffic accidents on the way, and you can see why road trauma is the number one killer of Thai's - it really is every man for himself out there. Motorbike weaving in, out and on the footpath, Tuk Tuk's cutting in and stopping and all manner of other vehicles jerry rigged for various purposes are the norm.

Bangkok at night reminds me of Blade Runner, with the Neon, the driving rain and the seedy vibe.

Today was the shopping day, and this is where it really starts to get fun. Despite all the warnings you get about people ripping you off, you are just not ready for the volume of people out there who notice you are of western origin and thus try and separate you from your money. For example just trying to walk down to the Sky train station to get to the market, we had, and I kid you not, at least 15 tuk tuk drivers try and pick us up to take us to what ever shop they were being paid off by.



Chatachuk weekend market was our first stop, the world's biggest market. It is sort of like Melbourne's Queen street market on steroids, and with more weird smelly food. We got completely lost in the place, and no doubt we saw less than a quarter of the 9,000 stalls, but we got some bargains anyway. A few CD's, Shirts, shoes and I got a genuine Tag Heuer watch. Only $10A! Well it says made in Switzerland so I assume it's real......

The thing is, all of the vendors see that you are western and ask ridiculous prices for everything, in case you are a sucker. Fortunately, Karen is the haggle master, and we managed to get everything pretty cheap, although you always get the nagging feeling you could have driven them lower.

Next stop was a bit of lunch which was a bit of an ordeal. It is tempting to eat off the street vendors, despite the warnings, because some of it smells so good, and it is soooo cheap. But, we decided that after a morning on our feet, we wanted to have a quiet sit down lunch. Ha! Quiet! There is no such word in this city, maybe with the exception of a Buddhist temple. So after fighting through a few places looking for somewhere, we very nearly gave up and did the piss weak tourist thing and ate at McDonald's. ( A value meal here is 49 Baht, or $1.80). Fortunately we persisted and found a reasonable place to eat, and for the princely sum of $12 we had fried king prawns, bbq ribs, a curry, rice and two drinks.

Rested and ready, we then tackled the famous Pan Thip plaza. This is a 7 storey computer market with everything a geek could ever want. This is where they sell the copy software and DVD's, and has been subject to Hollywood funded raids lately apparently. One of the funniest moments was when I was doing a covert deal for some DVD's with a shady guy, the police walked past, and he ripped his wares into a bag and hid behind his rack of legitimate DVD's until the danger passed. People are soliciting you from all angles to buy there stuff, and again, haggling is the order of the day, and it is hard work getting a decent price.

A final note, I have some pictures to embellish this entry, but it appears yahoo photos is not working, and despite the fact that I told optusnet before I left not to cancel my internet with my phone, they seem to and I can't upload to my server either. So you'll have to wait for pictures.