Roaming Thailand

We arrived in Bangkok two nights ago, to start our Roaming Thailand Trip with Gap Adventure Tours. There's 15 of us from all over, from Canada to UK to Australia. We lucked out since we're all in the same age group. The weather here in Bangkok is just right. It's their winter, so the temperature is around 20-25 degrees and it's not humid, which is a bonus. We arrived late during our first night from Hong Kong and quickly hit Khaosan Road, which is basically a budget traveller's dream - cheap food, drinks, shopping, and tons of entertainment ranging from massages to karaoke, to bars. They have tons of carts on the streets selling food for less than 100 baht (33 baht=1 US dollar) ranging from Pad Thai to fried crickets! yuck! You can buy fake goods ranging from expensive jeans to purses for a fraction of the price we pay back at home. They have a saying here, "same same" meaning that the quality is just as good as the real goods, just cheaper.

We spent the next day visiting the Grand Palace and doing some typical tourist stuff around the city. We met up w/ the group for dinner at the train station and started heading for the night train for our overnight journey to Chiang Mai. The sleeper train was surprisingly comfy. It's cool how they turned the seats into bunk beds. I managed to get some sleep, but the train was freezing cold. My most memorable moment from last night definetly have to be the special "disco cart". Our tour leader bigged it up and we were all expecting this crazy night club on a train, but was quickly disappointed when it was basically a restaurant like cart that happens to play Thai music. Little did we know that they had a brand new disco ball hidden in its newly packaged box, and a transvestite ready to entertain us. The transvestite, or as we like to call them TV (they're quite common in Thailand), even tried to hit on Kevin. Apparently he/she doesn't like white guys as they're too big for him/her. I especially enjoyed the "lady-boy's" rendition of "Like a Virgin". We went to bed pretty early, by 10:30 as we were all tired and had an early morning the next day.


I'll post soon about our adventures in Chiang Mai. We're off early tomorrow for our trek in the jungle for 3 days. Can't wait!