Bangkok
As we knew that we’d be arriving at the crack of dawn we had booked a room in Bangkok which sounded really nice – however once we arrived we found that it was at the end of horrible little alley that smelt of piss and they’d completely messed up our booking. They had reserved us a twin room (we had booked a double) but said that we had to come back after 12 (even though we’d specified we’d be arriving at 8am) and didn’t seem to care that we’d have to wait over 5hours and told us that everywhere in Bangkok was like that – which we know for a fact isn’t the case. So we cancelled our booking, got our deposit back and went off and found a decent room which we could move into straight away and got a couple of hours quality nap-time!

We had decided to spend our first week on one of the nearby islands so once we got out of bed at lunchtime we headed out and booked our tickets to Koh Samet for the following morning. We had quite a lot of shopping to do before heading off to the rest of the day was spent trading in our old books and finding guidebooks for Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh; buying a new pair of shorts, three new tops for Kim and finding a new room for when we got back from the island. A pretty jam-packed day to be honest, but we managed to do everything we needed to and got an amazing deal on the room for when we returned. We’d found the place on one of the online hostel websites and noticed that they had a special offer stay 3 nights get 1 free – instead of booking online we went round and booked it directly with them. The room itself was really nice too with a real double bed, air-con and free wi-fi all for the amazing price of 300 baht a night!

Koh Samet
We chose Koh Samet primarily because it’s supposed to only take about 3 hours to get there, however for some reason it managed to take us 7! This unfortunately meant that we’d arrived too late to spend any time on the beach, which would have been nice but we had another 5 days left. Once we found our room, which we somehow managed to get very cheap, I went for a shower and Kim had a lie down on the bed to wait for me until I got back. When I got back I tried to wake her up so that she could go for her shower but she was dead to the world, there was absolutely no waking her for the next four hours!

We didn’t really plan on staying out very late on the first night but somehow we ended up getting back after 1am, and this trend just seemed to keep happening over the next few nights. You end up getting into the routine of waking up around 11am, go for some lunch until 1-1.30pm, sunbathe and swim until 4.30pm, shower and a quick nap until 7pm, then food and drinks until midnight-2am! Certainly not a bad way to spend a week J

On our fourth night we managed to finally find something decent to eat – a giant kebab that must have been on a 2 foot long skewer with a jacket potato! After we’d finished our meal we stayed around for the most amazing fire show that we’d ever seen, a group of 8 young guys (some as young as 12) spinning sticks of fire whilst also performing acrobatics. The highlight of the night was when four of them stood on the other four guy’s shoulders and were then walked all the way around where we were all eating whilst spinning their fire!

All in all we had a really good time on Koh Samet – all except for the giant mosquitoes which were the only real downside to the island and caused more than a few nights sleep to be rudely interrupted!

Bangkok
It was such a relief to already have our room ready and waiting for us, especially once the air-con kicked in – never again will we stay in Bangkok without air-con! The week and a half we had planned out for Bangkok consisted of quite a lot of work for the both of us as we had free wi-fi in the room, and we seriously doubted that we’d have the chance again. Apart from the work we also planned on visiting most of the major tourist attractions over the space of 3 or 4 days – the only problem was the weather. Whilst we had been sat inside the room getting the work out of the way over the first 3 or 4 days the weather outside had been really good, nice clear skies and barely a drop of rain – however, once we decided to go out and see things it decided to change for the worse!

We made the most of the remaining time left and managed to get round to seeing all the tourist attractions on our list and also managed to fit in a couple of trips to the cinema – the highlight of which was seeing “The Dark Knight” at the IMAX sat on our own private VIP couch (with a pillow and a quilt provided for Kim!!!). We had one particularly good day where we just got the boat down to Chinatown and had a random wander around the streets all afternoon and ended up going around half of central Bangkok before heading back to our room at 11pm. There’s not really too much else that we can say about Bangkok, it’s one of those places that we always end up going back to and never seem to get tired of – which is why it’s probably the most likely place that we’d ever think of moving to permanently.