Bangkok to Laos

Tomorrow we're leaving Bangkok, and it's definitely city I would recommend, and come back to. We spent four nights here at the Cha Da hotel, which for 25 sterling a night was excellent value, given the quality - we've done our best to avoid the touristy Khao San Rd, and thankfully as a consequence haven't seen many Euro/US faces out our way.

The best thing about Bangkok for me, is the availability of good cheap (often street) food, and if you avoid the tourist traps you can eat for 30/40 baht (50-70p).  If you don't like spicy food, you're likely to go hungry, but I haven't really had a bad meal, or experience (anywhere) from eating where the locals eat... on the street!

The people here are also pretty friendly from what we can gather, hopefully that's a trait that will continue in the final stages of our trip. The city itself is big, much like London, and houses around 8 million heads. Actually, the only real annoyance here we've found are the greedy Taxi drivers. Being good travelers, we read up before we arrived, and knew the Taxi's were good value - providing they switched the meter on. Most of them however, try and agree an 'off the meter special price', which in my reckoning is usually 100% more than the fare if you had them use the meter rate... most of them either just drive off when you say meter, or as we found last night at the Banyan Tree hotel (we visited the Moon Vertigo bar, 59 floors up) agreed the meter to the concierge then didn't switch it on, assuming we'd roll with whatever price he decided when we arrived - at which point, I opened the door, and politely slammed the door for him 100 yards down the road, ahole.

Everything works pretty well here logistically, you have the Metro, the Skytrain (monorail), Taxi, Boats (river & canal), and the 'special price' Tuktuk (see above). As I said, it's definitely somewhere to look at visiting, and if we had more time I'd spend it in northern Thailand, and not the busier southern islands, hopefully on return to Bangkok we can take a look at Ko Chang/Ko Mak and discover more of rural Thailand, if it still exists!

Anyway, tickets booked, hopefully speak to you in Laos!