Bangkok City!

Hello again,

Like you probably remember, I am now since a few weeks in Bangkok, so its time for an update!

  

When I arrived with Nick here in Bangkok, we stayed at Koh San Road. Most people know it as the Backpacker Street, and I heard a lot of stories about it. But actually I didn’t like it there. The reason for it is just that there are like 90% tourists and 95% percent of them are just drinking all day and annoying with rude and respect-less behaviour. 

I mean, I like party but in a normal way. Mixed with local people and not like this. We stayed there for a few days before Nick left to south Thailand to enjoy the famous full moon party.

But as I planned to stay in Thailand for more than two months, I decided to skip this one and try to find an apartment in the time he is gone.

I was really amazed by the incredibly high accommodation costs for places on Koh San Road. We managed to find a little hidden place for 450 Baht (15 USD) a night (two beds with AC, TV and hot water shower) but that was an exception and its still high! 

Even a Hostel room without AC and like nine other people in the room was about 500 – 600 baht. So I decided to move more to the real centre of the City. Away from the tourist area. 

Sukhumvit Road has everything, from parks, over shopping malls and markets to the best clubbing scene in the city and of course also what Bangkok is so famous for: the red light districts. Not that I went there of course..

I found a nice Condo with Pool and Gym, AC and hot water plus a fridge and a balcony for 8500 THB a month at Sukhumvit 71, just minutes from the Skytrain. So I’m pretty happy with my place now! (Update: They charged additional 6000 THB for electricity (1 AC. Which is ridiculous. For comparison - in my next apartment, a few months later, I only paid 400 Baht for two AC's. But as it still was a cheap room overall, I didn't complain.)

After a few days Nick returned and moved into my place for his last two days in Asia. We had a great time on our last nights out in the clubs of Bangkok before he left to catch his plane.

I was a little sad to lose my travel buddy of the last three months. But I'm sure that I will see this guy again!

The next days I just enjoyed the city. Shopping is amazing here. Although most of the malls are very expensive, you can find  good quality and reasonably priced stuff if you know where to go. 


I tried out a lot of the delicious street food and went to see some movies with my Thai friends. The cinemas here are top of the line. All of them IMAX sized, all international movies run in English, and they are pretty cheap if you don't go in the expensive malls (Yes they are always located on the top floor of each mall). 

As my two week visa on arrival stamp was about to expire I made a trip to the immigration bureau and lined up for hours to get a new visa only to hear in the end that it isn’t possible to extend a visa on arrival and also not to get a tourist visa while you are in the country. 

That was disappointing, but there was an easy solution to it. I just took a train to Vientiane in Laos and made a so called Visa run. It took me in total three days in Laos but now I've got a new 60-Day-Visa.

(Update: There is a much cheaper and better way to do this. There are companies specialised in Visa Runs (2500 THB).
They pick you up at some gathering points and gather all passports and documents they need. then they drive you overnight to Vientiane with fast service at the border and bring you to the Thai embassy in the morning where you have to turn in all those documents and pay the visa-fee. Then you get transported to a hotel with a pool and free food - all of which is included in the price. The next morning you get back to the embassy and get a fast preferred pickup service. Half an hour later, you are already on your way back to the border with your new 90-Day-Visa and you arrive back in Bangkok by midnight.)

I’m already two weeks alone in the city now and I’m getting bored. Yes I know! How can you get bored in Bangkok? There are a lot of things to do, I want to see the water park, the ancient city, go to the floating markets in the north, go to the beach and so on. 

But in two weeks my friend Chris, from Switzerland, gets here to travel one month in Thailand with me. And it will be much more fun to do these things together. 

So I just relax a little and go out sometimes maybe wander around a park to take some pictures. 

Tomorrow, I will go and take a Thai cooking class. I’m pretty excited about it as Thai food is simply amazing!

Negative Update:

After four weeks in Bangkok I have to say I can’t believe what kind of people walk around here. I am talking about the foreigners. They are so disgusting seriously. I never saw so many fat, ugly and old men like here, like 80% of all foreigners are in this category (Hello Sex Tourists!!). 

Another 10% are men who look like they should be in a prison or mental health institution, and yes you hear right till now I say 90% percent of all foreigners are men. The rest of 10% percent is split up in like 5% backpackers with terrible attitude and behaviour, no respect for culture or religion (which also includes women) and some normal people. 

I think I sound old, but I was speaking with a lot of foreigners in the last weeks and I didn’t meet anybody that was normal. I met some guys recently, and while a few Thai girls where standing with us they were talking like: “Let`s get these bitches home” and “I need something to fuck” or “If they don’t do what we want we still can go to get some prostitutes”. 

And unfortunately that’s exactly what I see and hear here nearly every day – so I hope you can understand me now a little. I also see every day so many 60 – 100 year old men walking around with their 16-18 year old prostitutes. 
I can only feel bad for the poor girls who have to do this.

So, yes, I think here in Bangkok it’s not possible for me to find a normal person to be friends with. Only the Thais are behaving normal, and they don't seem to be too keen on becoming friends with me. Understandably if you consider what the rest of the tourists are like here...

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Cambodia Survival

After a calm down week in Vietnam I took a bus to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia to meet my buddy Nick.

The bus ride was pretty uncomfortable, with the common commercial stops at overpriced restaurants for breaks where you get charged for using the toilet and so I really started missing my motorbike. The weather was bad as usual in the last weeks but I didn’t care too much because I was excited to travel with my mate again. 

My first steps in the capital city of Cambodia were on wet ground and without any orientation. Nick told me that he would pick me up at the bus stop, but they are never on time. So after wandering around in the heavy rain to search a place with Wi-Fi, I finally found an internet coffee place. As we both didn’t have a Cambodian cellphone number, the internet was the only way to contact each other. I found out that he waited at the bus stop for about an hour and just returned to the hotel because he thought the bus didn’t stop there.

So address given I tried to get a Tuk Tuk, which was my next adventure, because the ones who knew the address did not want to drive me there, and the other ones just guessed where it could be... After one hour, I finally managed to find our hotel and went for a hot shower and got some rest.

The next days we tried to explore the city nightlife, which was not easy because the only places the tuk tuk drivers took us were bars with hookers, restaurants with hookers or clubs with hookers and ladyboys. Even if we told them we didn’t want to go to a place like this, it always turned out to be one of these places as soon as we arrived there. 

But during the daytime we did some trips, once to the shooting range where I fired an AK 47, a Pump gun and a big machine gun and also to the war museum where I learned a lot about the bloody regime of the Red Khmer. After this we paid our respects to the dead at the famous killing fields - which is a huge mass grave a bit out of town. 


On another day we visited the animal rescue center / zoo, which was very nice because we had behind the scene access to the tiger house and to see the leopards. And in the end we even could feed an elephant and walk around with him in the park. Just an amazing day.

One thing which you recognize immediately after you arrive in Cambodia is the huge amount of fancy big cars and the lack of motorbikes. Laos and Vietnam are full of bikes but in Cambodia you only saw a few of them. We found out that the reason for this difference is that motorbikes are much more expensive than a small car, even old bikes.  And fancy cars are nearly without any taxes, so cheaper than anywhere else in the world.  

In Vietnam on the other side the taxes for a car are 300%. For me that’s ridiculous, especially when you know how many people die every year in Vietnam in motorbike accidents.

Our last night in Phnom Penh was the best, but also scary at the end. I did some research to find some normal night clubs so we would for once not end up in a place full of prostitutes. We drove there and had an amazing night in the first club with no other foreigners than us dancing there. 

After that we walked to another spot, which turned out to be the place where rich people make party and again no foreigners there. The time there was even better, but we thought maybe we will find another good spot. When we left, some Cambodians asked us if we wanted to join them to go to another place.

We took a ride in their expensive pick-up truck - of course on the back - and had a good time with our new friends. The new place was nice and one of the Cambodians offered us a drink. I drank mine very fast and I immediately felt something was wrong... I went to the bathroom and felt losing the control over my body... There was something in our drinks! I managed to get Nick and get out of the place as fast as possible. Which was easier said than done, because seriously I barely could walk straight.

We arrived about an hour later safe at our hotel after the tuk tuk driver made a round across the city because he didn’t know our address. Crazy night!

Our next stop was Sihanouk Ville. The place with the (supposedly) nicest beaches in Cambodia. Actually the beaches were not too nice and it was raining all the time. On the main beach, were we stayed at first, everything was so overpriced and touristy so we decided to go to another beach one day later. We had a nice five minutes in the sun on the beach before it started raining... but I still took a swim in the warm ocean :)

After four days we left with the plan of a jungle trekking on our own a little north next to a huge lake. Do fishing, building shelters, making fires, just like Bear Grylls. On the way there it started raining so heavily and so we decided to skip our outdoor plans. 

We ended up in some random small town, which we both dont know the name of. We stayed there three days, drove with a bamboo train and visited a crocodile farm.

The next destination was Siam Reap, the place where  the famous Angkor Wat temple is located. This is actually pretty much everything to find there, only these amazing temples and a lot of child prostitutes. Which is a big matter - I again have to mention the bad things I experience as well. 

Most people don’t know it but in Siam Reap, the biggest destination for people who want to have sex with a child (0 - 18 old) was still running openly 3-4 years ago. 

A whole street which was selling children for sex and this all under military and police protection because of the corruption. Because of international pressure the places on this street are now closed down and the government freed a couple hundred kids. 
Unfortunately it`s no secret that these places are still around, just hidden now.

So my mission to inform the world is done for now. Back to the good things: 

We had an amazing bicycle trip to the temples around Angkor Wat, the temples are impressive and beautiful! 

The best place for me was the most destroyed one, where they shot one of the tomb raider movies. 

At the end of the bicycle trip we took a bath in the water ring around Angkor Wat and we saw some monkeys coming up to us. We watched them for a while but when we walked back to our bikes I saw that one monkey sat on my backpack and I tried to scare him away... 

That wasn't a good idea. He got angry and ran after me and so did about eight of his monkey-friends... As cute as they look, they have huge teeth and I didn't want to get bitten. 

It must have been funny to watch monkeys chasing after me in my flip-flops, because all of my buddies were just laughing their asses off instead of helping me  -.-

Yeah that was Cambodia and I am in Bangkok now 

I will update you as soon as I have good stories for you. Stay tuned!

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