After we were in Kaoh Sok National park we came back to Bangkok and I met up with Carlo and Egan for a couple of days. I didn't get to see them for long but we had a bit of craic. It reminded me of home seeing them again, and in a way it made me kind off homesick. They were having a totally different time then us, drinking their heads off every night, while we have barely been drinking at all, and they'd spent about three weeks of what our budget is in two days. After a couple of days they headed down to Koh Pah Nagn.



Last time we had been in Bangkok we spent almost all our time on Khao San Road (which is the main backpackers strip), so this time we tried to get out of there a bit. On the 7th of August we took a trip around Bangkok, taking some alternative modes of public transport, like the underground and the skytrain. We first got a taxi to Hualampong train station where I thought there was a skytrain stop, but I had read the map wrong and we were actually beside an underground stop. The taxi driver didn't mind though and still told us the skytrain was nearby (it wasn't). I realised my mistake anyway and we hopped on the underground and headed for a stop that had a nme similar to a stop on the skytrain route (the underground station did not show on the map where the service linked up with the Skytrain). The underground was, unsurprisingly, just like any other underground. On the actual metro train, we saw on the list of stops, the name of the stop which linked up with the Skytrain, so we got off one stop earlier than we'd paid for. It was a waste of 2 baht.

Then we were pretty excited waiting for the skytrain. I had images of a futuristic hovering train soaring at skyscraper level in the clouds high above Khao San Road. Then a DART pulled up and loads of commuters piled off onto the platform. We piled on and looked around at all the depressed commuting Thai people. It was pretty boring. It was like coming to Ireland and getting on the LUAS. There were some nice views though. Our ticket was one way but we used it as a return because we felt the Bangkok public transport authority owed us money after the crapness of the skytrain and headed back towards Siam Square, the main shopping district in Bangkok. First we went to Siam Centre, then headed for Mahboonkrong or MBK, a big shopping centre. The shops were a lot more expensive than I expected and a lot less cheap than the stalls of Khao Sarn, so I didn't buy any clothes or anything, but I was looking for a camera shop. Unfortunately we didn't find one because Steven had left the camcorder sitting on his chair in the pizza place we'd eaten in, so we all went running back there, hoping our camcorder was still there. Fortunately it was, and we decided to head for another shopping mall, called Siam Paragon. This was a very upmarket place, with Ferraris and Mini Coopers on display on one floor. On the top floor was a cinema and we saw a crap film, The Break Up, with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn.