25.7.24

Despite the Roof View Place reception guy being a bit of a misery the lady that cooks breakfast is a real sweetie. We had filter coffee, pineapple fried rice, bananas and satsumas.

It was drizzling but we fancied revisiting our old haunts from 2010.

We decided to go by river boat to Bangkoks biggest mall.

The pontoon wasn’t in action, but we saw lots of rowers. We sat and watched for a while but they just went forwards and backwards and it turned out that it wasn’t a race.

Finding the next pontoon was hilarious as it wasn’t possible to follow the river and we came to dead ends more than once.

We arrived at Icon Siam and instantly realised that wasn’t the mall we went to years ago. Anyway, it was raining so in we went.

Wow! About as far removed from the poverty in the  backwaters as possible.

Instead of pigs blood, crocodile or backbone soup we had chicken and pork dishes with identifiable meat, basil and noodles.

We got a boat back, much simpler than on the way there.

On the way back we stopped at a travel shop as we had run out of phone credit and they were showing top ups.  Yayy, package success and the ladies’ Turkish husband Mert joined us. It was interesting speaking with him about the pros and cons of living in Bangkok or Turkey. He was from Istanbul but had visited Olu Deniz a few years before and loved Fethiye. The other guy in there chatted to us about Ayutthaya temple as he’d noticed us watching its video on their screen.

We looked it up afterwards and it was a good long trip, then back again, and 2 buses to get to the train.

We decided not to bother as it looks like a smaller Ankor wat or My son, we’ve been to both. We wandered back via Khoa San road. It’s so different to the night time massive bar scene in the  daytime.

For dinner John sussed out the route to our favourite eatery from 14 years ago.

It was almost exactly as we remembered. A buffet and barbecue, cook your own. It was really great to be back there again with its riverside location.

Lovely to be back, we weren’t very adventurous but thoroughly enjoyed what we had.