The main goal of this part of the trip was to see Dan. It's been years and as we both live in the same part of the world it's just nuts that we haven't seen each other in so long.
Our plan is a speedy Northern Thailand highlights tour. We met in Bangkok and with our planes both being a little delayed, landed much later than planned.
Dan in his infinite wisdom booked a hotel in Chinatown. This cheesed me off a tad given that I have just spent three years locked inside on China but what can you do. I was in charge of the itinerary and he the hotels. In his defense, it was a beautiful hotel but so busy. Chinatown in general is a heaving place and our hotel had a snazzy jazz bar downstairs that seemed to be full all of the time. The hotel was very beautiful and 'instagram friendly' a term that I hate, but in this case it fits. Everything was covered in lanterns, there was a waterfall across one wall, a small bridge over a Koi pond to get into the hotel and everything looked to me to be an antique (or a copy of one I guess) so there were constantly people taking pictures or trying to look like they were staying there. We felt very smug every time we were waved across the bridge into the hotel itself.
I've been to Bangkok before so I was on tour guide duty. Luckily Dan and JiaXin proved easy going and quite happy to go off on their own if needed.
We had a lovely mean with one of JiaXin's friends in a lovely restaurant that over looked the river and the biggest temple in the city. It was really quite pretty and the food was excellent. Dan and I had spent the afternoon in the giant market and so had to get a tuktuk across town for dinner. What we hadn't realized was just how far away everything was and we ended up getting bounced about for nearly an hour.
We spent a very short time in Bangkok, basically enough time for them to get a feel for the place and then we headed out to Kanchanaburi, which is about 3 hours drive from Bangkok and the setting of "The Bridge over the River Kwai" of which I know very little (other than the film of course).
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