Hanuman

This is one of the many Hanuman (I believe it's Hanuman...) statues from the Grand Palace in Bangkok.

From our travel diary:

Courtney: First day in Bangkok. We wake up and took the sky train and underground to the train station to book tickets for the sleeper train to Chiang Mai. We then decided to brave a tuk-tuk and take one down to the pier where the government express boats run from. Being a tuk-tuk it took us to the wrong place to some unofficial pier where they ran day trips at really high prices (We should have listened to what people told us about). After a fair bit of walking we eventually found the pier.

We took the boat to a stop nearby the reclining buddha. Everything is gold and shiny. We then walked to the Grand Palace which didn't take too long.

Me: In the grand palace we took a free English speaking tour around. As the tour ended we wandered around and it started to rain. People were yelling a few hundred metres away. They were running in front of a wall of rain moving at about walking pace. We casually stepped under cover into a room of swords and waited about one minute for it to stop before leaving the palace.

Courtney: In the evening after a nice nap we decided to go for a walk down the road. We ended up finding a night market which was really busy. Didn't feel like I could stop walking or people start hasseling you. By the stalls where the clubs and bars were Steve was being hassled to go see a sex show, the guy said it was okay for me to go with haha.

As we were walking back there was a stall making some weird banana pancake parcels called banana rotee. It was banana and egg in the middle, then cut up with chocolate and condensed milk on the top. Was yummy!

Phew... That was a long entry. No wonder we ran out of steam with the journal. The road we wandered down in the evening was actually the notorious Pat Pong road and those banana rotees soon became a staple treat throughout our Thailand travels. Courtney pretty much lived off of them.

Uploaded 10/06/12