Against all odds, my brother and I have made it out of Bangkok alive and with all limbs attached.
Yesterday was mostly walking around Bangkok looking for food and WiFi in alternating order. Highlights: Polo fried chicken and Thipsamai pad thai, which for some reason also serves the best orange juice I’ve ever had.
As for drinks… you know you’ve got the right stuff when you ask for it in a shop and not only is it hidden behind the counter, but the shopkeeper looks at you with wide eyes, grinning. A farang (‘foreigner’, but for some reason also ‘guava’) wants lao khao?! Lao khao is a Thai rice whiskey: no English on the label, very little quality control, very cheap. I would guess it was 30-45% alcohol by volume.
As most locals do, we bought a 10 baht bottle of Thai Red Bull to mix with the lao khao. You can tell we’re really going for a classy drink, the kind you sip while sitting on the curb outside a train station.
It’s currently 6pm and we’re sitting in a hostel in Siem Reap, having just caught a train ($2 each), tuk-tuk ($1.50 each), and minibus ($11 each) straight from Bangkok, a long (11 hours) but not uncomfortable journey. The train, especially, was a fantastic six hours clacking through rural Thailand. It’s a testament to ‘Thai efficiency’ (I didn’t know that was a thing) that we can arrive 15 minutes before our train departure at 5:55am with only USD (no baht) and still have time to buy water before departure. You can bet we needed it.
A highlight of the journey was two Eastern Europeans who had obviously had a bigger night than us – they spent the entire journey half-asleep in some sort of drunk yoga session, every time I looked they had shifted:
The views from the train weren’t half bad, either.
May check out the temple complex at Angkor tomorrow or just head straight on to Saigon – we’ll see.
‘Til next time,
– Alex
