Bye-bye, Bangkok

After a few days in Hua Hin, we reluctantly headed back to Bangkok to catch the night train home to Chiang Mai. Following a slightly-less-grueling-but-still-fairly-horrible train ride, we arrived at the station in Bangkok and found out that the night trains to Chiang Mai were sold out for the next two days. Oh, but we could take the second-class "special express" (read: it's special how we manage to stop the train every 3.5 minutes) with reclining seats and a travel time of 14 hours. Thanks but NO THANKS.

We gratefully accepted the help of an enthusiastic tourism office worker who found us a hotel for the night. He assured us it was a nice hotel, and he didn't look deranged. He clearly was, though. The crap-hole he sent us to was most definitely the worst hotel I have had the misfortune of staying in. It looked like an aging concrete factory. We were required to pay a damage deposit when we signed in, which is never a good sign at a hotel. This was the type of hotel where if you want to take a warm shower, you have to first turn off the air conditioner for 10 minutes, because the hot water and the a/c run off the same power source.

We left our hotel to try and procure some food, but we couldn't find any restaurants within walking distance. The kids were all wrecks by that point, so Dave went down to the hotel restaurant, where he had to shout to be heard over an enthusiastic Thai singing karaoke very badly. He came back to the room about 10 minutes later, not entirely sure what he had ordered or whether the staff had understood that he wanted it brought to our room. Fortunately the food showed up not long after, and we chowed down. Not wanting to lose our damage deposit, we were especially careful not to wreck anything, especially the state-of-the-art AM/FM radio-cassette deck combo.

We could not wait to get out of Bangkok. In the morning we headed straight for the airport and caught the first flight back to Chiang Mai. See you later, Bangkok! Hopefully much later.

Posted in: Bangkok