Week 1: Bangkok & Krabi/Koh Phi Phi, finally!

27 mei 2016 - Siem Reap, Cambodja

Hi everyone!

So, this took me quite a while. Sorry about that! Life has been pretty intensive here, in a good way, so it took me a while to get myself together and make time to update my blog. I will do my best to update more often from now on, but as you probably already figured considering I've already been in Siem Reap for a month (!): don't pin me down on it, haha.

Let's start with meeting our travel buddies Marieke and Ide in Bangkok. We quickly went on to find our hostel and get settled, so we could slowly start discovering this continously busy city. On that first day, the first thing we wanted to see was Khao San Road: a street full of bars, restaurants, clothing stalls and 'food' stands crawling with people and rats. We walked through it once and then ran into four other students from Groningen, that were in Bangkok for a few days on their way to the Phillipines. How we managed to run into them in a city as big as Bangkok, I still don't understand. We decided to have dinner together, which was something to prepare for after we saw so many tarantulas and scorpions on sticks for sale on the streets.. luckily the local menu was pretty good: the pad thai I had was delicious :) we had a few drinks afterwards and had a fun night before we would all start our projects next week!

After trying not to have nightmares about ping pong ball sounds (if you don't know what I'm referring to: try googling 'ping pong show thailand', if you dare..), we started our next day with a trip to Grand Palace. Or so we thought. After thinking we were walking to Grand Palace for about an hour and a half, we ended up at Gold Mountain, a small 'mountain' with a temple on top. Which was exactly the opposite direction from Grand Palace. Whoops! The view from the temple was quite nice and we saw a big part of Bangkok that day, so that more than made up for all the sweating, hihi. After that, we took a tuktuk back to our hostel. If you want to see what our faces looked like: see the photo album. It was quite the experience, especially for me and Elisa considering it was our first tuktuk ever
We then relaxed a bit and had dinner and drinks on a rooftop. It was terrible, as you might imagine.

The next day we started semi-early with a boat trip through the canals of Bangkok. This was quite eye-opening: so much rubbish everywhere, so many small children happy to see other faces come by their little wooden houses and vendors in boats. After the trip, we saw Wat Pho: a temple complex with the Reclining Buddha (which is huge!). That night, a rat thought our dinner looked so nice he would join us at the table. You can imagine our shock, I guess. That night we would leave for Krabi so we hung out a bit at our hostel with the nice Indian family that ran it, before 'sleeping' at the airport until our flight would leave.

After a taxi to the airport of Bangkok, a flight to Krabi, a tuktuk to the port of Krabi, a ferry to Koh Phi Phi and a small boat, we finally arrived at our resort on Koh Phi Phi. That's where we spent the next three days. This part will be a bit shorter, because I can actually summarize it in a few sentences: clear blue sea, bungalows, fireshows, cocktails in the dark on the beach for Elisa's birthday, snorkeling, fresh fruit, beers, crabs, choosing your own fish to have BBQ'ed, monkeys and tiny bats. That's pretty much all we did and saw on our relaxing retreat :) all of you will know how bad I am at keeping things short, so I hope I made you proud about this part. Check out the photos if you want a better image! (Literally. Hihi)

After Koh Phi Phi, we had another relaxing ferry back to Krabi. That's where we spent the last night in Thailand: in a hostel with airconditioning (hello tiny piece of heaven) and at a small local restaurant where food was only about a dollar and was freshly cut and prepared right in front of you. Quite a nice way to end our first week in Asia :) especially because we had technically been on one scooter with 6 people on our way to the hostel and saw a laundry shop that had a sign saying 'Laundry. Drop your pants here.' My apologies if my sense of humour doesn't make you laugh, but you can't say I didn't try!

Anyhow. Early the next morning we flew to Bangkok and then to Siem Reap, where we would start our next adventure: volunteering for 8 weeks. I'll update you about that later, but for now I'll already say this: it has been so rewarding and exciting. Though I miss everything back in the Netherlands, it'll be hard to leave my temporary home and everyone and everything I've gotten attached to in the past month. That's how much I feel at home here :)

On that note: see you later, alligators!

Lots of love from Lucy

Foto’s