Arriving in Bangkok in the middle of the afternoon after the internal Indian flight, and then the flight from Kolkata, was quite a strange feeling and at the time I felt a little dazed. I'd been running around so much during the past few days that I hadn't managed to book any accomodation in the city, so after collecting my luggage, I spent an hour or so looking at various places online before selecting a place a short distance away from the downtown district. Rather than take a taxi - although I later discovered the hotel provided a complementary pick-up if you stayed longer than two nights, something I somehow missed when looking, perhaps due to fatigue - I decided to get there by public transport. This meant using a combination of the underground and light rail system - the 'skytrain' - which was astonishingly clean and well-maintained. I gazed at the immaculate flooring of the skytrain looking for a single scrap of litter, but there was none at all. Every station was manned by a uniformed policeman, although remarkably there are hardly any refuse bins at the skytrain stations, so people must form the habit of taking rubbish home with them and getting rid of it there . After weeks of negotiating pretty grimy public transport systems in India, Nepal and Myanmar it was quite a culture shock to be in such a relatively clean public space. I reflected upon the litter and graffiti on Manchester's metrolink service, and wondered what the people of Bangkok would make of that!
I spent the next week or so resting up from the past few weeks' exertions, as well as updating this blog. I felt extremely tired so it felt as though all of the running around had finally caught up with me, but also the combination of heat and humidity in Bangkok was physically quite a shock to the system. The places I had visited earlier had been pretty warm, but had nothing like the humid of Bangkok. So moving away from an air conditioned environment, such as the hotel, was quite uncomfortable as you became suddenly bathed in perspiration with the heat of many hairdryers burrowing into your beng simultaneously! But it was good to have that rest, recover some strength, take stock of where I'd been and where I wanted to go.
I spent the next week or so resting up from the past few weeks' exertions, as well as updating this blog. I felt extremely tired so it felt as though all of the running around had finally caught up with me, but also the combination of heat and humidity in Bangkok was physically quite a shock to the system. The places I had visited earlier had been pretty warm, but had nothing like the humid of Bangkok. So moving away from an air conditioned environment, such as the hotel, was quite uncomfortable as you became suddenly bathed in perspiration with the heat of many hairdryers burrowing into your beng simultaneously! But it was good to have that rest, recover some strength, take stock of where I'd been and where I wanted to go.
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