Final blog post from Asia - Bangkok

We have finished our 12 week trip by staying in Bangkok before flying home tomorrow morning. Bangkok is huge and has loads to do, we just scratched the surface with a few sights and a little market shopping. 

The only problem with Bangkok is so many tourists come here that you get some unscrupulous people trying to rip you off nearly everywhere. Everything from "tourist police" trying to sell you a tour package after claiming a sight is closed, to shop owners selling your broken faulty items and tuk tuk driver tripling the fare compared to what locals pay. It just gets a bit tiring to be the constant target of scams. 



But we have seen some impressive things in Bangkok. For our final day here we were also joined by Kerry (and her friend Megan) who we visited in Pattaya a couple of weeks ago.


We went to The grand palace today, where the king used to live and hold court, but that changed when he decided to move out to another palace to let the public walk around the outside of the palace and visit the attached temple (gaining money from tourists to restore the palace). The attached temple houses a Jade Buddha statute that is so special only the king can dress him for the different seasons.



  

   

  



Just out side the palace walls is another temple complex with a huge reclining Buddha. The reclining Buddha is a 15m high and 43m long. This huge statue of Buddha is covered in gold leaf and has mother of pearl decorating the soles of the feet. It is pretty impressive to see! 

 

The grounds around the reclining Buddha have a number of Pagodas, other statues and landscaped areas. Both of us were very impressed with the very elaborate roof decorations that shine in the sunlight with thousands of reflective pieces in a series of mosaics. 

   

    

In the afternoon of our last day in Thailand we explored a very random shopping mall that was themed with a different country on each level. We ran up and down all the levels so we could claim we visited 7 countries in under 4 minutes! 

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France and Japan

    

Rome and London

   



Istanbul and San Francisco

The Bahamas


A crowning jewel of our time in Bangkok was seeing a giant furry Sid the sloth and Scrat from Ice Age 4. Again we run (chased!) and caught them and got photos!
    

   

  

Sitting in our final hotel room, writing about our final day exploring feels very odd. Thank you for everyone who has read our blog, everyone who has emailed us or sent us a message we feel very loved even when we are thousands of miles away. (Special thanks to Kerry and Gareth's Mum and Dad for leaving so many comments!). See you all in the UK soon.