Day 41 - 44 Bangkok

Our trip from Koh Tao to Bangkok was another biggie, a 2 hour ferry coupled with a 9 hour bus ride. Arriving in Bangkok late at night in the pouring rain just added to our confusion, this city was enormous and so spread out. It was even a bit of a challenge for the experienced and talented map reader/direction sensor among us...aka Mike.  After joining up with fellow travelers who were heading to the same area as us we shared one speeding, horn honking, aggressive, rally driving taxi to Sukhumvit. We stayed at a B&B called Room@bangkok where each room is individually decorated, and all its furnishings match its name. We stayed in the very cool & quirky black rose room. Our  next few days in Bangkok were really a mixture of two things...shopping & eating. We walked basically non stop from 9am to 5pm at the amazing and huge Chatuchak markets. This place is over 20acres of stalls ranging from vintage clothes to animals, from artwork to plants. We were in awe at the  share range of things and the unbelievable price that we ended up having to box and ship back our purchases to NZ. We visited the Patpong markets, and tried to avoid the ladyboys and young thai women in underwear. We explored the huge MBK mall in Siam and the Siam markets. We got lost in the gourmet food market at the very fancy Pagoda mall. The food selection at this  place was amazing, the heavily decorated cupcakes and cakes were the best I have ever seen. Mike and I sat down to a "pick & mix" fresh salad (that consisted of everything you would ever  dream of putting in a salad) and a bounty bar cake!!! On our last day in this shopping addiction fueling, crazy smog breathing, land of 10 million motorbike city we spent some time at the post office shipping our purchases home, and prepared ourselves for our overnight train journey to Laos.