Caroline's adventure

An extended stay in Bangkok after some serious bites.

Years of planning, saving and talking about travelling and I finally made it to Bangkok in Thailand but I hadn’t expected to have a set back quite so quickly…

My very first night I got bitten by (what I think was) a lot of mosquitoes, some photo evidence of those bites on my first full day:

We’ll come back to that but despite my awful feet I was determined to explore Bangkok.

Khaosan Road is pretty much the tourist street. At night you can barely hear yourself think as each mediocre DJ tries to play their terrible music louder than the next DJ. Some people love it, I was not one of them… if you want to eat a scorpion too this is the place to do it. I did buy a bag from here though so it wasn’t all bad.

I also had a little walk around and bumped in to a team of people filming something, one of them spoke to me and apologised for getting so close and explained they were filming a TV series. They had a lot of equipment that’s for sure!

I also happened to walk past Jay Fai’s street food restaurant – you might know she was awarded a michelin star or you might have watched the street food Netflix documentary with her in… either way business is clearly going well for her!

She’s the lady cooking in the famous goggles

I then decided on the next day to do a cycling tour – this was really cool but by this point my feet were so horrible from the bites the tour guides actually gave me plasters and mosquito repellent, they really helped me out. It was an awesome tour though and I learnt a fair bit about the temples (e.g. depending on the day of the week you were born will depend which Buddha you pray to.) Here are some pictures from that tour:

I had to take a few days off after this because my feet were in so much pain and I could barely walk but I still managed to do a cooking course. I was the only one so it felt like I’d just gone over to a local’s house to cook some food.

Once my feet were starting to feel better I went around some of the temples and the Grand Palace. The palace was amazingly beautiful but there were SO many tourists – I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many tourists in one place.

If you’re going to Bangkok i’d recommend going to watch some Muay Thai at one of the stadiums. It was interesting to see the sport done by professionals (and not one of the tourist versions you see on the islands). I also made friends with two Swedish medics who were on an exchange at a hospital in Bangkok, they said it was really interesting and they’d never had to deal with snake bites before.