Today we leave Saigon for Thailand. We met the rest of our tour group for the first time. Sure enough, it's filled with old Vietnamese people. There is one other rather young couple, but they are local to Vietnam, so we don't speak to them much.
It's a 1 hour flight to Thailand, so we barely finished our snack by the time we land. We all pile onto the charter bus, which thankfully has A/C. You've never seen a place filled with so many tour buses; there are more here than Orlando.
On the way to Bangkok, we stop by an awesome crocodile farm. Actually, it looks like it once was an awesome farm, and now it's deserted save for the occasional tour group. I took tons of pictures and movies, hoping I'd get lucky with a shot of the trainer getting his arm/head bitten off. No Luck.
We reach Bangkok and check into our hotel, which is above average. After dinner, we cross the street and enter one of the thousands of massage parlors. No, we did not get a happy ending. Just a regular oil massage. I swear the women here have hands of steel. I got bruises on my legs from the rubdown. And this wasn't even one of the famous Thai massages, which really hurt like hell.
First on the day's itinerary was a trip to the Grand Palace and adjacent Emerald Wat. It's quite a spread, with lots of shiny stuff. That's pretty much it. The rest of the day, we were supposed to go to a "spy show" (think Indiana Jones at MGM studios, but way more lame) and a "dolphin show" (again, think Sea World divided by 1000). Since Kiet and I have suffered through these shows on our last trip in 2004, we spared everyone else in our group the same torture.
Instead, we bailed out of the group, and walked to a local market near one of the main canals. We took a 90 minute boat tour of a bunch of back canals, taking in the local lifestyle. Thailand, though rather poor, still has its beautiful moments. When we landed, we ate lunch at the market, then took a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. Navigating the busy streets of Bangkok in a three-wheeled motor vehicle is almost as crazy as mopeds in Saigon, though not quite.
By then, the group was back from their shows (they were all amazed at the pyrotechnics), and were getting ready for dinner. We stayed separate from the group, ate on our own, and headed off to what would be a highlight of the trip: a Muay Thai fight in Lumphini Stadium.
We bought ringside tickets for 2000 baht (about $60 USD). Apparently, it's damn near impossible to buy non-ringside tickets from anyone. They say it's "safer" for you in the VIP section, though we all know it's because we're foreign and we're big ballers. We get there, and our seats were pretty good. We were in the last row of the ringside section, which is only about 8 rows back. There were 7 matches that night and a few of them were pretty badass. Final tally: two knockouts, five decisions, no muggings.
After the fight, we head to a nearby night market, grab some grub, and head home. Tomorrow, we hit the road to Pattaya.
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