Bangkok is not for beginners

We’ve been all over Asia including some of the world’s largest cities, among people that don’t speak a word of English, navigated trains and taxis and even boats but nothing we’ve done is in the league of Bangkok,

This place is exhausting. Traffic is crushing – to the point that it skews your decision making about where you’ll go and how you’ll get there. This picture is from 10pm.

There is a constant chaos around you – people everywhere, lines everywhere, cars everywhere, cyclos everywhere. Motor vehicles come at you from every direction.

Traffic is so bad that we found taxis unwilling to take us back to our hotel because it would take them too long. We wound up in a tuk tuk at one point and were only able to convince the driver to take us to the BTS (metro) station where we got on the train to get back to our hotel. Time spent doing that was nearly two hours to go just 7km.

Look below,and you’ll see it was a 7 minute drive to go 4/10ths of a mile. And you’d normally just jump out of the cab and walk the rest of the way but you can’t be guaranteed that you can even cross the street as they are mostly separated by fences to prevent pedestrians from wandering into traffic.

It’s truly a struggle here and miraculuous that people get to work everyday. So if you haven’t been to Asia yet, I don’t think I’d start with Bangkok. Maybe someplace easier like Tokyo or Singapore.

But on the flip side the Thai people are genuinely nice and have been very kind to us when we’ve asked for help. The street food is everywhere and it’s delicious.

L

100 baht ($3) will get you a full meal of barbequed chicken and sticky rice, both of which are amazing

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We’re looking forward to getting out of town tomorrow for a respite (after one day!). Tomorrow is market day in the small towns west of Bangkok. We’ve hired a driver in an air conditioned van for the day.