Bangkok - Rest Day

Spent a relaxing day doing not very much: mostly just reading, blogging, and planning out our route for mainland Southeast Asia. We're basically going to make our way north in bite sized pieces to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, then cross into Laos nearby and make our way down to Vientiane through Laos, possibly doing a river boat ride and/or some trekking up in the mountains. Not sure if we will take the Laos or the Thai route from there down to Cambodia and Angkor Wat. We plan to return to Bangkok at the end, since we aren't feeling done with it yet, but wanted to be out of town for the big political rally happening on Sunday. After that, the plan is to make our way down to Singapore, probably by land with some stops at the beach and in Malaysia. From either Singapore or Kuala Lumpur we will fly to Indonesia--maybe Borneo and almost certainly the island east of Borneo that looks like a starfish (can you tell I don't have a map or guidebook sitting next to me right now?).

In the afternoon we went out and bought a larger backpack to enable us to send the packs we started with home and have one large pack and one daypack (picked up in Mcleod Ganj). Total volume isn't more than we left home with, but this should be more convenient. Best thing about the new packs is that they each have mesh with air behind to against your back for ventilation. We tried to mail our packs and souvenirs home after, but the post office was closed.

For dinner, we decided to wander around and find a less touristy area. Unfortunately the problem with this plan is that you quickly run out of people who speak English or English menus. And while we know the Thai names for most things we want to order, they don't use our alphabet here. Add to this all the strange seafood and the fact that neither of us cares for seafood, and you have a dangerous combination. We ended up stopping in at one of the little Wall's stores (don't know how to describe this, except to say they seem to compete with the very popular 7 Elevens--Thailand has half as many 7 Elevens as the whole USA, making them much denser here), where Josh decided he needed to buy and try a Thai beer. A bit beyond, we found a street stall displaying meats we recognized and managed to order by pointing to ingredients. But fortunately she didn't treat it as "design your own Thai dish" and made us very good and familiar Thai dishes. The beer wasn't too bad either, since it didn't taste much like beer.

On the way to dinner, we saw this guy sitting under a bridge. Hard to see from the photo, but it must have been around 6 feet long.

From Drop Box