Bangkok - The City of Scams

A trio of herb red Capsian and saffron crepes filled with plain, Arabic and Indian style scrambled eggs served with sauteed mushrooms and a tomato cup filled with baked beans.

or

Triangles of honeycombed waffles topped with berries and poached apple waffles.

No, not the Cardiff Hilton, or the stingy Jury's either, but a selection from the menu (yes, you heard me, menu!) on the airplane over. What's more they gave me proper cutlery to eat it with. Granted the food still came in cheap tinfoil and tasted like cardboard, but proper silver (well, stainless steel then) cutlery. Talk about class! I also had a personal telly, video games and 35 films to choose from. They even had some Only Fools and Horses! Once we were in the air the hostesses became waitresses, serving us with whatever drink we ordered for free (no Tequila Rose though, amateurs!). And to think that I only flied with them because they were cheaper than airlines I'd actually heard of! All I was expecting was to get from Manchester to Bangkok, via Abu Dhabi, in one piece. I didn't expect service!

My only little complaint about Etihad Airlines is that, even though both planes were pretty full, they put me in an empty row twice. Now I know I'm not the smallest guy, and I wasn't complaining about being able to stretch out across more than one seats, but surely giving me four seats to myself, twice, is taking the piss! Especially since I was desperate to talk to someone so that I could latch on to them and hope they knew what they were gonna do once we got to Bangkok, because I for one had no idea. In the end I managed to strike a conversation with two boys from Leeds on the bus. One of them calls me Peter by mistake. He knows he's wrong and I know he's wrong, but neither of us noticed until about 4 hours in and by then it was too late. It would be too embarassing for me to correct him or him to ask for my name again, so I'm Peter for the rest of today! We found a hotle, well I call it a hotel, it's got nice beds and a shower, but to get to it we had to jump over some puddles of raw sewrage and cats so skinny you could nearly see through them!

Today we took a Tuk Tuk round Bangkok. For the uneducated among you, this is a Tuk Tuk

Not the most comfortable ride, especially with three squashed in the back! What's more, tuk tuk drivers have no recognition of the idea of "lanes" and like to dodge queues by finding small gaps between lorries! At one time we were even going horizontal across the road, dodghing traffic coming across us!

They tried to take us for one long con. After some scavengers tried to force us to give them money some nice local "student" and his very hot girlfriend came over to ask if we got away ok. He asked us where we were headed and told us that we couldn't go there (the Palace) in our sandals. He suggested a lot of sights to go see instead, the nice man even drew us map. He suggested we find a Tuk Tuk driver to take us round them and, just as if God had plucked him from the heavens, a driver appeared. We should have realised that it was one of the notorious Bangkok scams but, due to the very hot girlfriend, our minds were elswehere!

At one of the sights the driver went away to the toilets. Just then a nice friendly tourist from North Thailand came for a chat, asking where we were headed. When he saw our map he was delighted! He'd been to our next destination that very morning, there was a nice tailor there who was celebrating the King's birthday with a massive sale. He'd bought 6 for himself and two for his mother! The only thing is no one was supposed to know about it since it was a local's secret. But, being the nice man he was, he thought he'd let us know!

So basically we ended up in a tailors looking at very cheap, crap fabrics, pretending to have an interest because we didn't want the Tuk Tuk man to drive off, leaving us in the middle of Bangkok! The tailor even managed a friendly "Iechyd Da" when he found out I was Welsh! We basically acted around for twenty minutes, pretending to be interested in the most horrid colours and jackets we could find. Then we promised we'd come back later. Our nice Tuk Tuk man, who was being paid comission to take us to the place but didn't really care if we actually bought anything, then took us home. The great thing is that the Tuk Tuk man was happy, he had his commission, and we were very happy. We'd seen a lot of Bangkok, had a very entertaining 3 hours fearing for our lives on the streets, and all we had to pay the guy in the end was 25p each!