Day 42 - 28th Mar 2009

We had a lazy morning and just stayed at the hotel. We had breakfast and then went for a swim. I finally managed to do a length of the pool doing front crawl, I usually do breast stroke so this was quite an acheivement for me.

We slowly packed our bags and got ready to leave, although we were pretty sad as we bothed really liked our hotel and Penang. Oh well there's more things to see so we had to get packing and move on. We left the hotel to get lunch from a local cafe and then got a taxi to the airport. We arrived with plenty of time to spare and checked in, just making the weight restrictions. This was the first flight that we didn't get seats together. The flight was with AirAsia a kind of Ryan Air for Asia. The flight left on time and we arrived in Bangkok at about 6pm. The airport seemed pretty new and looked quite modern. We decided to get a metered taxi to our hotel. There's a weird coupon system although you don't pay or agree a price, just say where you're going. Anyway we set off only for our taxi driver to let on that he didn't know where our hotel was. He phoned them up and seemed happy about getting there. We had a couple of communication issues with him not knowing much English and us not knowing any Thai. We started getting concerned as the meter kept going up and up and soon it was more than we had money to pay. We had to pay for a couple of road tolls so we were getting a bit concerned that we didn't have enough to pay for the taxi. Although we had checked how much it should be in our guide book so we knew we should be able to afford it. Adam hoped the figure we would be charged was the small top figure where as I had a horrible feeling he was going to try and change us the extortinate bottom number. So we finally got the hotel and he said the price, he also tried to say he was doing it cheaper than he should! The figure was about 3 times the price guide book said, and more than we actually had. So we started to negotiate. Eventually we paid about half the amount he quoted, which was still quite expensive, but we weren't too sure what we could do. We checked with the hotel how much it should cost and they said about half of what we had paid! Oh well, you live and learn I guess. Lets just hope that the return journey doesn't cost so much...

After checking we decided to head out and look for some food. The hotel recommended going to Kan san road, which is the main tourist road in Bangkok. We arrived there as they were taking part in Earth Hour which meant there were hardly any lights on. It was still really busy but kinda dark. We got some pizza from a stall and called into the local Boots store, yep the Nottingham based Boots! We then headed back to the hotel exhausted and ready for a good nights sleep. (We managed to get slightly lost on the way back, it's hard navigating in the dark!)

P.S. - Thank goodness the room has aircon...