Quick Stop in Bangkok

We arrived late in Bangkok late the night before and stayed in hotel not far from DMK airport called Louis Tavern. It was about 45 minute car journey out of the city, it was a nice hotel that looked to be recently renovated.

We got up early because we had booked a walking tour of Bangkok and our tour guide (named Nutty) was meeting us in the city centre by one of the subway train stations. The tour ended up only being my girlfriend and I so Nutty said we could decided what we wanted to see most but to be honest we didn't know a lot about Bangkok so we just had her take us to where she already had planned.

The tour lasted six hours and in that time we visited three different temples - no shorts are allowed in temples and woman have to cover their arms. At one of them we stopped and fed some turtles they had in the pond there. We went to street markets to look at the goods the locals sell and tried some food, that consisting of chilli catfish - which it was - jellied rice sheets which was sweet and frog, it tasted like chicken.

We requested the tour to end in China Town because our second tour was starting from there in an hour. First we went into the mall and got a coffee from the Starbucks, after all that walking we deserved a treat and a rest. Before the hour had completely passed we waited outside the mall where we would meet our next tour guide Tom. We a food tour with him through AirBnB. The tour was us and one other person following Tom around China Town and stopping at different street food vendors to try authentic food, we also stopped at a few small restaurants that had Michelin commendations. The food and experience overall was excellent.

After the tour we were so tired we headed back to the hotel to get a early night because we had another tour the next day.

We woke early again because we need to get into the city again for our tour, this one being for The Grand Palace. We stopped at a cafe nearby to grab breakfast before the tour started. This tour compared to the tours yesterday was a lot busier. Not only did our group have ten of us there were multiple other groups, some with similar size to ours and others with numbers closer to fifty. The tour itself was OK overall, we enjoyed seeing the architecture and the Jade Buddha but we struggled to comprehend the tour guide so a lot of the information she told us was lost.

The guide only lasted a few hours in the morning so we still had most of the day still to fill until our activity in the evening. We decided to look up if there was any Michelin starred or commendation places nearby which there was so we did a small circuit to visit some. We tried stick rice mango, interesting but nice. Pad Thai which was amazing and a pork broth, which in my opinion was just a poor imitation of Pho (I do love fresh Pho in Vietnam.)

After that we took a tuktuk back to China Town mall, we had booked another experience through AirBnB here which was a beginners class to Thai Massage. This was probably the highlight of the trip for me because not only was it informative on how to do it but also everything was hands on. My girlfriend and I had a great laugh giving each other massages and even the ladies teaching us had a good laugh (I'm not very flexible so everything hurt and clicked.)

Afterwards we went upstairs to the food court and went to ramen/ noodles place which was really tasty. Once full we headed back to the hotel because we had an earlier morning flight to catch to head back to Vietnam.