April 23, 2015

OK, so it was more than one night in Bangkok, but I’ve been humming that song every since we got to Bangkok!  It was quite an ordeal to get here, but totally worth it once we finally arrived.

Getting from Cambodia to Bangkok seemed like it should be easy:  get on the bus, go through customs/immigration, get to downtown Bangkok, take a taxi to where we were staying.  Unfortunately, the border crossing was crazy and insanely HOT!  We spent about 2 hours getting through immigration and there was ZERO a/c in the fully enclosed room that was filled full of a ton of people.  Hayden’s look pretty much says it all:

OMG…It’s HOT!!

Once we finally made it through (and then managed to find our bus again), we spent another couple of hours getting to Bangkok.  We were very fortunate to meet some new friends while we were in Siem Reap and they live in Bangkok, so they invited us to stay with them.  They have 2 kids just about Hayden’s age, so he was super excited to spend a couple of days playing.  Their house was awesome, and the kids had a fantastic time.  We went to a water park that was on top of a mall for the first day.  Hayden was also able to take advantage of the fact that they lived on an international school campus (they are both teachers) and use a real classroom to do homework for a change!

Mall top water park!

School Time!

School Time!

The next day, we went into town on our own and went to visit some of the temples inside of the city.  We were very lucky to meet a “tourist police” officer who gave us the low-down on where to go and how much to pay for a tuk-tuk.  He even found us a tuk-tuk for only 40 Baht for the entire day (about $1.10), which we were told was a great deal.  The driver was super nice and even walked us into each of the places and helped us to find our way around.  We went to Wat Pho, the White Buddha, Wat Arun, Wat Traimit, Wat Ratchanatdaram, and a couple of other places.  It was a nice change from all of the temples in China and Vietnam that looked similar.

Giant Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho

Wat Pho

Water Garden at Wat Pho

White Buddha Temple

White Buddha

After a couple of great days in Bangkok and some great new friends, we are heading down to the beaches in Krabi for a few relaxing days before we take off to Africa next week!  Woo Hoo!