I forgot to put these photos in the blog from Bali. We just thought that this photo of the old Indonesian chap and his T-shirt was priceless also the novel use of used plastic bottles in a restaurant.
I wondered if the level of English comprehension and spoken language had improved in the 25years since I had been in Bangkok. It hadn’t. I don’t know whether they are not taught much English at school but in the hotel, at restaurants and in the shops and stalls it was very hard to make ourselves understood or understand the little English that people had. This was again very different from Bali where apart from the taxi drivers most people spoke some reasonable English and in lots of cases the basics in many other languages. I find it surprising as Bangkok is very dependant on tourism and has been for so many years but you feel quite isolated not speaking the language and not being able to chat to people.
Someone said it is hard to get your head around the city of Bangkok and we found that to be true. There is no specific “city centre” but there are high rise buildings, enormous shopping malls and markets in many areas of the city on both sides of the river. It is a very clean city despite a lot of the old buildings looking very dirty and decrepit with the mould and concrete decay because of the high humidity and heat all the time. There are many,many massage parlours with an amazing range of names.
Like a lot of large cities there are very defined areas of slums/middle class areas and the very wealthy areas. There were quite a few people begging on the street and there is a lot of poverty. There is a lot of old corrugated iron and plastic sheeting along the railway line where people live and the very old tumble down shacks along the canals but there are also hundreds of new tract housing being built outside the city as in Malaysia.
In Bali the Hindu temples are made up of mainly concrete castings and are all grey and they only really look colourful when there is a large ceremony and they drape things w ith mainly yellow material and there are a lot of fruit offerings piled high in beautifully decorated baskets.
The Buddhist temples in Thailand are very different. They are pristine and painted stark white with very colourful mainly burnt orange or green glazed tiles on the roof which really glisten in the sunlight. The buildings are heavily decorated and ornate. 
Some of the Buddhas inside and outside are enormous and in some places people pay for large swathes of bright yellow cloth which are then thrown over the Buddha’s shoulder not unlike the way a monk ties his robe. In China they won’t let you photograph inside the temple but here there was only one of the many we visited that photography wasn’t allowed inside. There is also a tradition to bring good luck of putting gold leaf onto some of the stone buddhas and in some places they sell you a couple of flowers, jos sticks and a small piece of gold leaf to put on a buddha.
We tried a couple of restaurants (an excellent Vietnamese one-see photos)
that were well written up on trip advisor in various parts of the city and on several occasions we walked up a good appetite looking for the places down dark alleys and having been given conflicting directions by several helpful people who had no idea.
The pavements in a lot of areas are not the best and in the dark you have to watch where you are walking. Unfortunately for Maurice some of the street signs were at levels for the small Thai people and he went smack into one of them with his head. I managed to grab him before he staggered over the kerb onto the road and although it made for a terrible bang, he only got a small nick in his head. The doctor told him years ago that he had a skull like an aboriginal so that is very fortunate!
We decided to do the day trip to Ayutthaya (the old capital) which is about an 1-2hours north of Bangkok. We caught the metro to the end of the line and then a taxi to the bus terminal and took an airconditioned bus for 50 Thai baht – not even $1 to the town of Ayutthaya. We then took a tuk tuk to visit the several “wats” spread all over the town for 3 hours.
The ruins and temples were fascinating and there were very few tourists around probably because of the 40degree heat. The city when it was the capital must have been very beautiful and very spread out by the distances that we covered.
There are many signs “no entry – damaged area” and there was apparently a lot of flood damage to many of the ruins. There are piles of fresh bricks lying around and workers repairing the damaged ruins. You can see on some of the signs and walls up to where the water came during the flooding.
We left Bangkok on the train to Chiang Mai at 8.30 in the morning on Friday the 11th May. They advertise it as a 12hour trip but ours was 14hours.
We only made a few stops and for a short time but there were quite a few times when the train had to slow to a crawl along dodgy tracks mainly in the marshy areas.
It was however a very interesting trip and the landscape changed from the plains to the hills before it got dark about 7pm.
The 2nd class air conditioned train which also has the old style fans on the ceiling was very comfortable apart from the 2hours where the airconditioning didn’t work and it was like a toaster inside the compartment but luckily it came back on again and then we needed jumpers. 
For $25 we got good coffee and half a jam sandwich when we left and then from an airline type cart a very tasty meal in a tray of chicken and eggplants with rice and a mug of iced water, then afternoon tea with 1/2 jam sandwich again and an evening meal of fried rice with egg and vegetables which was also delicious. They came and swept the cabin periodically, collected any rubbish and the service was excellent. One girl and one man did the whole 3 carriages so we made sure we tipped them when we got off. They worked so hard for the whole 14hours.
Maurice did his best to decapitate himself along the way. He being his nosey self was looking between the carriages when a man pushed by him and Maurice’s hat fell off. When he bent down to retrieve it the automatic doors closed on his head and broke his sunglasses. Thank goodness for his hard skull again!
There was no break in the buildings, factories and housing from Bangkok to Ayutthaya which we saw the day before from the bus but in contrast to that the landscape from the train from just outside Bangkok also going north was very rural with lots of rice paddies and shanty type towns.
The rice paddies look like green carpets as they have been sown with a seeder and not by hand.
This is our itinerary for the next part of the trip.
IN 11MAY – OUT 17 MAY BODHI SERENE CHIANG MAI HOTEL
17MAY – BUS CHIANG MAI – CHIANG KHONG – 7HRS 0830-1530 -IMMIGRATION & CROSS RIVER TO LAOS
IN 17MAY – OUT 18MAY TEAK GARDEN HOTEL CHIANG KHONG
18MAY – SLOW BOAT TO PAK BENG – 1NIGHT’S COMPULSORY STOP
IN 18MAY – OUT 19MAY MONSAVANH GUEST HOUSE 020-5771935
19MAY – SLOW BOAT TO LUANG PRABANG
IN 19MAY – OUT 25MAY LE BEL AIR RESORT – LUANG PRABANG, LAOS
25TH MAY – MINI VAN LUANG PRABANG – VIENTIANE 8HRS
in 25th MAY – OUT 26TH MAY AVILLA PHASOUK HOTEL VIENTIANE
MU752/26MAY VIENTIANE-KUNMING
IN 26MAY – OUT 28MAY KUNMING TRIUMPHAL GOLDEN HORSE HOTEL!
28 MAY – TRAIN KUNMING – HANGZHOU 36HOURS.
in 30thMAY – OUT 5jUNE INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE HOTEL ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY.
Some more photos of Ayutthaya.
I read in an aircraft magazine the other day that Maurice and I are known now as “flashpackers” which means we carry a lot of electronic devices when we travel. I must say we are both enjoying our e-readers which saves carting around books to read and the i-pod and computer come in handy on long trips when I can at least type up the blog.