King Kreissler needs the world

one week asia - what happened so far

The first three nights of my asian trip I stayed in Bangkok. I kind of like the city, especially the backpacker atmosphere in and around Khao San Road. Everything is so relaxed and friendly, very easy to get to know new people, similar to Dublins Temple Bar.
On my first evening for instance, I sit down at one of those illegal street bars where I got drunk in no time (probably because of the long flight or the very strong cocktails). You must know they have those little vehicles here, where they open the front lid and immediately it turns into a bar. Afterwards they just put a few chairs on the street in front of it and thats it - the shop is open and you are more than welcome to have a seat - until, yeah until the police is aproaching the street. In this case the shop/bar owner very quickly remove all the furniture and the guests have to stand a couple of meters away from it. Nothing left that looks like a place to have drinks anymore.
The next day I suffered from the jetlag as well as from the hangover, didn't do much of sightseeing or discovering the city. I only went to do what was really important - to apply for both a Myanmar and a Cambodia visa.
On my third day in Bangkok I wasn't much more hard working. To lazy to walk and find the right way to certain monuments I asked one of those tuk tuk drivers to show me the city. I have therefore seen the Golden Mountain, a standing Buddha, some other temples and heaps of other noisy Bangkok streets.
Then, for the next three days, I booked an organized tour to get me out of the city. The first day of the tour we went to see amongst other things the Bridge on the River Kwai (known from the movie) as well as a national park with waterfalls. The night we spent in a house that swims on the river (similar to how the Kellys live).
Next morning I did one thing I will probably never ever do again in my whole life - I washed an elefant. Sitting on the back of such an enormous animal, my legs clamped just behind its ears somewhere, that elefant went down to the river (me on top) and shortly after walking further into the river the elefant started to drain. At that time my elefant guide gave me a brush and now I had to start washing it. What a fun. What else happened that day, well, our group did some very relaxing and chilling bamboo rafting on the river, we furthermore went to see some other waterfalls and a cave (while exiting the cave I thought this is gonna be it, I will not make it out of here, impossible, everything was so dark, slippy and muddy and, worst of all, extremely narrow in there.
The last day of that organized tour wasn't so organized at all. Our Thai tour guides finally mixed up the whole program and if we wouldn't have taken care of certain things ourselves, the day would have ended in surprise (means: maybe our backpacks would not be in our van, but in a completely different one with a completely different destination; we also probably would have seen the same waterfalls on that day as the day before, rather than going somewhere new; we probably would not have been brought back to Bangkok but to a very different place; and so on)
In the end it all went well and we had a good time out there in the Elefant Camp just beside the riverbank, but we were all happy to be back in busy Bangkok, too.

The picture shows some friends from the tour and me enjoying our dinner in Bangkok alltogether.