Day 56, Wednesday 29 Feb 2012, Bangkok
Leap year this year, huh – Wahoo, 0ne more day of travelling!
Today we go back to the Myanmar consulate to (hopefully) get our visas. We have booked flights to Yangon from Bangkok on the 12th March, with me returning to Bangkok on the 27th and Mike flying to Kuala Lumpur to head to Europe. In the meantime we will do a quick tour of Cambodia and head off by bus to Siem Reap tomorrow morning. The consulate opens at 3.30 so a slow start to the day.
I spent some time on the internet this morning, updated the blog “The Plan” page with the new details and caught up with a mass upload of photos to Flickr, as I was way behind, all this interneting is time consuming, and I still owe a few people some emails – so sorry!
We left the hostel around mid-day and stopped at a hawker stall on the street for an absolutely delicious banana and chocolate crepe, for the massive sum of about 40 cents. Auckland really needs to have this sort of street food – of course it would be against some food or health regulation ! We took a couple of trains back out to the Chao Phraya river and caught the ferry again up to the Wat Pho stop like the other day. This time we jumped on another ferry that just went back and forth across the river to Wat Arun. Not sure if I would eat this guys catch to be honest.
Skippering a ferry across the river is not that exciting obviously, when we set sail and were aimed in the general direction of the far bank, he continued his knotting and steered with his knees.
Obviously nothing sexist about the dress code! Personall,y I think shorty shorts should be encouraged, with conditions attached of course.
Wat Arun translates to temple of the dawn, and it would be fabulous to be there at sunset, though I think I would really struggle to get there at the moment, cannot get enough sleep and feel really groggy in the mornings. The Prangs (the large towers) were built in the early 1820’s and are decorated with shells and bits of porcelain. We spent an hour or so wandering around the site. There is info on it here.
http://www.watarun.org/index_en.html
In the cloisters, under the encircled buddha figures are hundreds of photos, I am assuming of people whose ashes may be in the cloisters, I could not find any information about it, the site itself has very little information available in English sadly.
Climbed the very steep staircases, it was great to be to get close to the detail.
For some great views over Bangkok.
I took a lot of photos of stone heads again; they had quite a few different ones to Wat Pho and the Grand Palace. I have posted these in a prior post as there were a few : ) but I do think they are cool.
We then caught the ferry back to the other side, had a quick lunch and caught the ferry back to the train and the train back to the Myanmar Consulate where we got our visas – Yes !!! mission accomplished, a day later than planned, but at least we have visas and can now fly to Yangoon in 12 days knowing we wont get kicked out at the border.
After the consulate it was a train back to the hostel and some lying down, very tired tonight, we had an early dinner. We were planning on going back to the place we ate at last night as it was so good, however it was closed. I really wanted rice as I had a noodle dish for lunch, but none of the rice options appealed so we went to the cafe we had dinner at a couple of days ago. Sadly it was not great, very greasy pad thai. I left feeling bloated and blah – hope it is not something coming on, as tomorrow morning we leave for Angkor !! Early night.
The music bit…
As promised – The Subliminals. I first got into The Subliminals through Michael and Chantal, two of my bestest friends. Jared, the bass player was a friend of theirs and after hearing their EP and seeing them live I was hooked. The music speaks for itself, just fabbo!, lots of droney post rock, with the odd vocal track thrown in.
This clip is from the recent Flying Nun 30th anniversary gig and I am still kicking myself for not going to this show.
Where is Phil now? 
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