Today was a day of travel, starting with, as usual, a great breakfast.

‘We love having you stay Mr Dave and Mrs Sara. Thank you for staying from Australia, please come to visit us again’. It could almost have been called a fond farewell, as the staff who have looked after us for the past few days lined up to say goodbye. Mr Teng, who has been the day manager over the three days was almost teary ?(   

Pic: Breakfast was a ham and tomato omelette.

On our ‘trip plan’ we had allowed a three-hour gap from the time we left the hotel to when our plane was due to leave, but the hotel staff convinced us to wait longer at the hotel. Conveniently, the hotel is only a short 10-minute taxi ride from the International Airport. Its not like other large Asian cities where the airport is out of the CBD. I’m not sure if it’s the impact of the virus on traveller numbers, or if it is always this quiet, but there were very few cars on the road and the airport was near empty! More than half of the flights on the departure board were listed as cancelled.

Even without Covid-19 we have always been fans of hand sanitizer while travelling.  Pretty much everywhere we have visited, including shopping centres, banks, airline check-ins, hotels and even grocery shops have had large self-serve pump packs of hand sanitizer available. A couple of work friends gave me some extra small bottles before we left, but we haven’t had to use too much of them yet with all the free stuff around.

My brother Mark and his partner Lee were due to arrive in Thailand tomorrow. Unfortunately, due to travel restrictions they are now not coming 🙁 I am really sad about that as we were looking forward to exploring Bangkok and Hua Hin with them. We need to plan a replacement holiday Mark! Thankfully the house swap is still going ahead. We head to the beachside town of Sam Roi Yot on Monday.

We arrived in Bangkok just after lunch and quickly passed though immigration and collected our bags. The taxi queue was non-existent and because the plane took off and landed ahead of schedule, we were again in the taxi by the time the plane was due to land. The taxi rank has a great ticketing system that then sends you to a particular taxi  and you have a ticketed record of your taxi number and driver’s name. I like the security you get from that system and also that there is a standard airport to Bangkok hotel fee of 7000 baht (A$35), so no haggling required!

It was again a very hot day. The temperatures don’t vary much here from day to day with the range of maximums usually in the mid-30s.  None-the-less we set off on an afternoon walk, motivated mostly by my hunger rather than a desire for exercise!

We are staying at the Narai Hotel on Silom road, which is a long, busy street in the middle of Bangkok. There is no CBD as such, but there are plenty of shops, street-side vendors, massage rooms and tailors nearby. Within 50 metres of the hotel we found three laundries, one of which had a three-hour service so we dropped off a bag of dirty clothes then walked briskly down the street (remember I was hungry!) until we found a small mall that had a downstairs food hall. I chose a north Thai restaurant, ordered their speciality, a green papaya salad (with rice noodles, chilli and peanuts), a serve of sticky rice and a bottle of water and devoured the super spicy and flavoursome salad in about two minutes flat! With burning lips and reduced ‘hanger’ (its a genuine emotion 😉 ) we continued down Silom Road watching the locals go about their days and being offered ‘special price for you’ items, taxis and tuk tuk rides every few metres.

A relaxing foot massage; delivery dinner (while watching an episode of The Crown on Netflix); and our hotel ‘welcome drink’ in the lobby bar (while listening to some very ordinary renditions of 70s Boney M), rounded out our day, and we were super ready to fall into our very comfortable bed by 10pm. We have stayed at this hotel a few times before, but it has been renovated recently and now has floor to ceiling windows so you can look over the city from bed.  I’m not sure it helped me sleep (but then not much helps me do that), but it was a great view to watch through the night.

Holiday half way through. We have done so much already, but still lots of fun things to do, including going to Bangkok’s most well-regarded restaurant tomorrow night. Did I tell you I really like holidays!  (View from our room window below).

If you are not into toilet humour… don’t read on.

The toilet in our hotel bathroom is very flash. It washes (choice of front, back or both), air dries (warm or cold) and a even has a heated seat. Best feature, in Dave’s opinion, is the self-opening seat that is triggered by movement. Have a look at Dave’s smile. Boys and toilet humour haha!

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