Taken the first day after landing; both of us were Zombie-like and rather out of it, but my brain seems to have been capable of composing my usual strangely-angled shots. Thanks to Richard for the title.

While away, I asked Richard to take my car out once or twice to make it feel wanted.  The day before we came home, he took it out for a spin (curiously all the way to Camberwell), where it just (in his words) stopped.

As this was the first news I was given upon our return from our trip I was understandably a bit anxious, given that the car was left out on a busy suburban street.  However it hadn’t been there long and the area is hardly the slums so I expected nothing would be wrong.

And it wasn’t.  We drove out to the car’s location yesterday and I quickly realised that the battery was the fault.  I tried jumpstarting from Justine’s car but that didn’t seem to work at all.  Since the car was pretty much stranded, and Justine’s car had no hope of towing it, I called the RACV to use my membership for the first time.

Except that even though I’m a member at the RACV, and have their highest rating insurance, I’m not covered for Roadside Assistance.  Both Justine and I were sure I was covered by it from the wording in a letter we received previously, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

I paid their exorbitant joining fee and we began to wait.  I mentioned to Richard that we only had one set of keys so couldn’t possibly drive both cars home, to which he replied, “Why not take the key off the chain?”.

Yep.  Still jetlagged.

The RACV guy arrived after only ten or fifteen minutes and after jumpstarting the car by connecting one cable to the body instead of the battery, cleaned the corrosion off which was the cause of the problem — I’ve experienced that before, but only realised after he’d done it.

Oh well.  Car’s OK, problem’s solved, and we now have an RACV Roadside Assistance membership… even though we thought we already did.

Taken at around 12am (Bangkok time) while waiting for our plane’s departure lounge to open.

Well, we landed safely a few minutes to eight last night. We bought our maximum 4.5 litres of alcohol and instead of using the ePassport checkin, we went through the normal way together — the ePassport line was short, but incredibly slow so we switched — which was lucky since we had to go through together to get the booze in.

After impatiently waiting for our bags we were faced with an incredibly long line for customs, but like about half of the other people there, we pushed in to make things go faster. Nothing was confiscated, though we thought a wooden hat purchased from a lady on a boat in Thailand may have been. Probably wise to have declared it, though.

We were greeted by what I can only call the “cheering paparazzi” as we strolled out of immigration; very embarrassing but it was fun anyway. I’m disappointed they didn’t have a badly drawn up card with our names misspelled somehow.

On the hazy trip home — we only had a few minutes sleep on the plane and had woken up at 4am Bangkok time — Justine began to freak out that she’d forgotten a Venetian mask that she had been carrying in a separate bag the entire time since Venice (about three weeks) to avoid crushing it. We stopped and thankfully it was quickly found.

We had a bit of a chat at Dad’s house and I showed a few photos and then I drove home where, upon pulling into the drive way, things went a bit strange. On seeing the exterior, and then the interior of the house, for some reason it didn’t feel like my house even though I knew perfectly well it was. Justine mentioned the same thing before I had a chance to say it so obviously I wasn’t alone. Quite a surreal thing walking around your own house, knowing the place intimately yet it not feeling like yours.

When I woke this morning (not that I slept much, a few hours maybe) the place still felt distant but a lot better than the night previous. Since we both couldn’t sleep we got up and unwrapped all our souvenirs; it felt very much like Christmas.

It’s three o’clock and I have just realised that I have not yet had lunch, or eaten anything except for two chocolates at all. Isn’t being a zombie from jet lag fun? There are a few photos I had put online at http://storage.bludger.org/images/trip/ but in my current state I don’t know if they look very good or not — I know the photos are fine but the processing might be a bit off, which is why they are there for now.

Day Forty-Nine
Bangkok
25 September 2007 22:05

Today was, sadly, the last day of our holiday, not including travel.  We went on another tour, which headed out early to see Thai temples and the Grand Palace.

We first saw the gold Buddha, which is a large, solid gold, 5 ton Buddha statue.  People were crammed into a tiny room just to see or pray to it.

The guide then ushered us onto the Wat Pho temple.  Here, there is a 46 metre long reclining statue, covered this time in gold leaf.  Even though the first one is impressive I liked this one better due to it’s immense size.

Next, after yet another bus ride, was the Grand Palace.  I did not realise how young the country is, so even though temples are made to look old there is a lot of concrete around making it all seem rather new. Here, we saw the Jade Buddha.  A single piece of jade, it’s still small but nonetheless very nice.  Strangely, you can’t take photos inside but if you go out of the room you can easily take photos through the window.

It’s like this in other rooms, some you can take photos, some you can’t.  We saw the throne room, coronation room and the King’s private temples.  Some of them, anyway.

As we left the Palace, we were faced with a wall of people forcing souvenirs onto us.  One guy in the tour group had ten or so chasing him.

Finally, for some reason, we went to a gem “factory” and what can only be described as the dodgiest “video” I’ve ever seen.  Six slide projectors worked in unison to flash images trying to be a video.  Hilarious.

Exiting the theatre a horde of workers clung onto each person, couple or group and led them through a small workshop to a massive salesroom.  Most of the stuff was more than we were willing to spend — and not really to our tastes — so Justine bought some earrings.

An hour or so later and our mini van bus thing got us to our hotel.  We both had a Thai massage (about $20 for both, for an hour!) which involves a lot of stretching and prodding as well as massage.

After the massage we took a tuk tuk to the “sky train” and caught it to a huge shopping centre.  Prices were the same as at home; we decided to head back but first checked out another shopping centre.  This one had knockoffs of everything at extremely low prices.  DVDs, clothes, luggage, all fake, all cheap.  I looked around, while Justine had a pedicure, and we headed back without buying much.

A taxi driver tried to charge 500 baht ($22ish) for a very short ride but we managed to get it for 140 baht in the end.

Day Forty-Eight
Bangkok
24 September 2007 21:36

Our taxi ride from the airport, when we had finally figured out where to get the taxis, was hair-raising indeed.

The traffic here is as bad as I’ve seen on TV or heard about. The drver was doing 110 in an 80 zone and a number of times I thought a crash was imminent.

When finally we reached our hotel, the brief step out of the air-conditioned taxi into the hot, thick, humid street was a shock to the system.  After so many cheap hotels we’ve gone for a 5-star hotel, partly because we got a good deal, and besides smelling of smoke it’s quite nice.

Since our time is limited, we opted to do some “tours” instead of legging it ourselves as we’ve been doing.  Our feet need a break anyway.

The first tour was a rice barge along the canals of Bangkok.  I new the city was on the water but am surprised at how much water, rivers and canals there are here.  The barge moves at quite a pace which makes taking photos quite a challenge.

The barge came to a stop on some stairs (literally, it just pushed onto them) which came out of the water.  Here, people were washing their clothes on the bank in muddy waters.  Washing themselves, too.

We got off the barge with the group, turned around onto a dock and got onto a larger boat where we cruised back to the starting point.  Thai fruit was served but we didn’t likemuch of it.  Mango and sticky rice wasn’t bad though.

Our tour bus took us back to the hotel in the busy streets again; it’s strange seeing a city this was as we have been on street level the whole time.  This feels a bit removed from it all.

At the hotel we hit the pool, on the top floor of the building, which offered nice views.

Another tour, this time for dinner took us to an old, lame restaurant.  There were maybe 15 guests in the place who all came to see traditional Thai dancing.  The dancing was fine but we expected a lot better than this!  I guess you get what you pay for.  The dancing included a “battle” scene with people in “monkey” and “demon” costumes.

Since our day had been technically 36 hours, we both crashed and need some sleep.

Day Forty-Seven
Over Europe (?)
23 September 2007

Not much to write about today.  We woke at around seven, ate a quick breakfast and headed for the tube.

We disembarked at the wrong terminal but there is a free train between the terminals at Heathrow.  It took 20 minutes before it even left.

It’s easy to see why people take the train all over Europe.  While the actual plane part is fine, all the security having to check in hours before, it’s very time consuming.  We even had to take our shoes off for a scan!

Again a large plane with no personal screens to keep us entertained.  Being in a large plane for a dozen hours is surreal and when you finally get off it’s sometimes hard to remember when it’s supposed to be.

Today only lasts 12 hours (for us), so it’s surprising there’s little to talk about.