Bangkok – Thailand

Bangkok was our meeting spot with Nicolas before starting our Indian journey. After queueing more than an hour for my passport stamp, I had an other hour to wait for my friend arriving from Myanmar. Happy to see each other, we head out to our hostel with the good service of uncle Uber. The weather in Bangkok was almost unbearable : 36° at 11pm, really humid, and no wind to cool us down. Nicolas knows Bangkok so he took me to Khao San Road, probably one of the worst places in the world, where drunk backpackers eat grilled insects, western food, take drugs and get so wasted that it looks like the “fête de la Musique” in France. Just walking through this for 10 minutes made me really uncomfortable! Fortunately, it’s only one street, and as soon as you leave this hell hole, you can enjoy some quietness and good Thai food. Anyways, we both went to sleep really fast cause we had to wake up early in the morning to go to Wat Bang Prah (read the article here).

After coming back from the temple, we decided to lay down in our AC room, and to go out a bit later, when you would think the weather has cooled down. But it has not! We met with one of Nicolas friend, Alex, a French art director, that he met in Myanmar during the worst bus journey of his life. We arrived in a really shut down Chinatown market, so we head out to the indian neighborhood in order to prepare our journey coming.

The following day, Nicolas asked me what I wanted to do, and there was actually three things : take a boat, take the sky train and see the skyline. Easy enough! There is a lot of temple here in Bangkok, but I’ve seen a few in the past 3 months, and just a day of walking around without visiting stuff sounded much more better for the both of us. We hopped on a boat and our first stop was the MBK tower to buy some photo gear. Not much to see around here, just a big mall, though, the food corner is pretty hectic and good. We were a bit disappointed cause on mondays, museums are closed so we couldn’t see the Salgado’s exhibition in the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, standing in front of the MBK. Anyways, we then took the sky train, had some amazing views over the crazy skyline of the city and felt like riding into the future! We changed for a boat and decided to go to Wat Arun, the dawn temple. The place is really different from what I’ve seen so far so I’m glad we decided to finally do some sightseeing. After two hours walking around the place, we had to go back to our place cause the office of the hostel was closing at 6pm. We’re here on time, and the clerk kindly asked us to leave the premises, so we just squatted in front of his hostel, enjoying the free wifi, our flight for Kolkata leaving 6 hours later. After a pretty funny ride with aunty Uber towards the airport, Les Alchimistes are (kind of) rested and ready to depart!