Buckets in Bangkok

Hello. I made it to Bangkok in one piece, although the journey there was not the best experience of my life. I arrived at the bus station in KL in plenty of time for my 9pm bus. No one who worked there seemed to know which platform it was leaving from, although plenty of people saw fit to order me to walk all around the bus station with my heavy bag on. I asked all the bus drivers, no one knew where I was supposed to go. Eventually someone told me which platform it would be, so I sat there and waited. 9pm came and went but I was assured that it was ok and the traffic was just bad. At 9.30 I was told I had missed it, although I'm not convinced it ever turned up. Then one of the bus drivers shouted a lot on his phone in Malay and made me follow him around, then ordered me on to a different bus and told me to get off at somewhere I'd never heard of. He was very impatient when I said I didn't understand. It turns out I was being taken to a different bus station where I could pick up the bus I was supposed to be on, so that was ok. The bus dropped me off in the middle of nowhere at 5.30am, with no one around. Luckily a taxi turned up and took me to the border. Queued for ages twice because I was in the wrong place the first time but no one told me. Made it across the border, absolutely no westerners were around for any of this trip so far. Then I had to get an hour long mini bus ride to another town, where I bought my bus ticket to Bangkok. That bus journey was 12 hours. When I arrived in Bangkok there were very few people around again. A nice local lady told me which local bus to get, so I eventually made it to the backpacker district at about 10pm, absolutely exhausted despite having slept for most of the journey!

Haven't done much in Bangkok really, apart from eat and drink a lot, although I did visit the grand palace which was very grand. I met up with Charlie, the guy I first met in Singapore, which was nice. On my first day here a tuk tuk driver offered to take me to some sights, which actually meant he took me to a jewellery shop so he could get some commission. He then said he wanted to take me to another shop which I needed to look around so he could get a voucher for free fuel. He wasn't happy when I said no and insisted he take me to something worth looking at. He then took me to see a big Buddha thing, which was nice, but when I went back to get back into the tuk tuk he had disappeared, even though I hadn't paid him! I had no idea where I was, but was quite glad to be rid of him and I managed to walk back to my guest house so all was well. Also had an unfortunate experience with some women and some pigeons. As we were walking down the street they forced some bags of corn into our hands, insisting 'no you very lucky!' when I said I didn't want it. Then they ripped open the bags so we had hands full of corn so there was nothing to do except throw it to the pigeons, and then they demanded money for the corn. When I said no I thought the toothless old lady who had given it to me was going to hit me, and she actually started scratching one of the guys I was with who ended up giving her 3 quid! I was not impressed.

Went out drinking last night and today was a very bad hangover day, on account of the unnecessary number of buckets. I was very surprised when I looked at my watch and saw that it was 6am as I was leaving the bar this morning.. So I am now tee total, and my body is a temple.

I'm moving on tomorrow on my own, heading to Kanchanaburi, which I'm looking forward to. More updates to follow shortly!