Bangkok

We’re here safe, but ‘sound’ is a bit optimistic, we’re absolutely melting in the heat! I don’t know what temperature it has been today, but I just looked at a thermometer by the pool at the Atlanta hotel where we’re staying and it’s 32⁰C now at 19:30 in the evening and feeling a little bit cooler than it did earlier. However, the humidity must be really high as it is absolutely debilitating!

Our lunch being prepared at a roadside hawker stall

Just a short walk outside, or in the lobby of the hotel, which isn’t air conditioned is enough after 10 minutes and then we hurry back to our room which is absolutely fantastic to walk into. Can we stand this for two months? I’m not sure, it’s really headache inducing and wipes us out, totally! I hope we get used to it!

It’s nice being back in familiar territory at the Atlanta hotel, where we started on our adventure last November, but it is stuck on its own a bit. We can walk to a local street where there are lots of bars and street stalls, but I really don’t know where to look! It’s full of young Thai girls in very short skirts hanging around in the bars waiting to be picked up and plenty of old guy’s looking for that opportunity. There’s something quite unsavoury seeing an old bloke with a young Thai girl, so after discounting bar after bar as it wasn’t the place we wanted to go to, we ended up back at the Atlanta for dinner.

It’s reassuringly old fashioned, all ‘art deco’, has a number of resident cats (which pleases Jackie) and an excellent (and cheap) restaurant. We’ve just had 2 beers each (about a litre each), two main meals, Jackie had a red curry with rice (very tasty) and I had prawn stir fry with rice, that I ordered ‘hot’ (hot it was, but only in places. The small red chillies were dynamite, so most were left on the plate, otherwise I couldn’t speak and my nose and eyes ran!). We shared both and obviously Jackie didn’t have any of the small red chillies as she managed to eat hers! (I did, I had 3, BUT only one of them was the killer crying variety, though they all looked the same!) We followed that by a small ice cream each. The cost? 410 baht, which at about 46 baht to £1 is about £9! Lunch was chicken fried rice from a hawker stall and cost 40 baht, about £0.90. ah, it’s good being back in Thailand, just hope we can cope with the heat!