Bangkok

We arrived in the early, early morning a short walk from Khao San Road. After wandering around for about 15 minutes with a number of other backpackers in tow we eventually found the place. It's a relatively short street and was quite quiet at 5:30 in the morning (although the bars had plenty of people in them still going from last night). We tried a couple of hotels, Lianne was very keen to get one with a swimming pool and we ended up blowing the budget a little and we ended up paying 750Bhat/night for the room (NZ$30, GBP11). But it did have a pool on the roof and that was a godsend in the hot muggy atmosphere of Bangkok.
We had a few hours early morning kip to recover from the overnight trip then went out exploring.
We found Bangkok quite hard work, partly because it is so busy and full or people but mainly because almost all of the Thai people are complete tossers and out to rip you off (apologies to any Thais reading this, but it's true). On a number of occasions tuk-tuk drivers or passers by would lie to us and tell us to go in the opposite direction to where we should be going, I assume so that we'd get lost and confused and end up parting with some cash in order to sort ourselves out. Lots of people hassled us trying to sell us stuff and it became quite tedious after, say, 2 minutes.
The first day we went to the Grand Palace in the centre of Bangkok which was really nice. Lots of amazing temples and beautiful buildings. It was like an Asian St Pauls Cathedral and Buckingham Palace rolled into one.
That afternoon we booked our trip to Cambodia and arranged our Cambodian Visas. We had to give our passports to some random Thai person to do this, and given our current opinion of the Thais we were very scared.We cruised round looking at some of the sites and played a game of 10 pin bowling in the coolest bowling alley we've ever been to. We rounded off the night with a few beers and some food in Khao San.
The next day we slept in, went for a quick swim then caught the ferry down the river and had a wander around.
We went to a snake farm which was really good. Lianne hates snakes but loved the snake farm (I know not why). There were giant king cobras on show right in front of us (no glass or cages involved) - it was actually quite scary. Lianne got to touch some of the poisonous snakes (she was very brave!) and at the end we both had a snake wrapped around our necks.
After this we went to see the golden buddha, which is made of solid gold and weighs in at 3 1/2 tonnes! US$14m worth of gold alone. Unfortunately we weren't strong enough to carry it home, and anyway it would have cost more than that in excess baggage to get it to the UK.
That night we went exploring in Patpong road. They have some great night markets for hooky gear. Lianne bought a Welsh rugby jersey (would you believe it) for NZ$8. We also saw some other stuff that night involving ping pong balls, but in deference to Maurine and Aunty Betty who will be reading this we won't go into the details. But it was an eye opener!
After that we took a tuk-tuk home (bloody tuk-tuk drivers again - they wanted 300 Bhat to get us home and we ended up paying 100, and I still think we were ripped off).
The next morning was an early start for our bus to Cambodia...