Bangkok

What a holiday !  We decided on a few days in Bangkok before we started our birding trip. Booked The Ibis, Riverside in Bangkok. Very reasonably priced at £160 for us both for 4 nights.  I thought this would give us birds along the water and it was close to the temples and eating places across the river. We arrived around 10am, after an overnight flight, and as soon as our room was ready we were in there for a nap, finally venturing out around 4pm. We thought we would eat at the Calypso Centre, just across the river. This involved a couple of boat rides, all free of charge. Karen loves seafood and thought she would spend the month eating king prawns but after seeing them alive in massive tanks in all the restaurants, she couldn't eat a single one ! The restaurants all contain tanks of prawns and assorted fish, lobsters etc. You choose what you want, they kill it and cook it for you. 

Nothing prepared us for the Bangkok smog. It never lifted in the 4 days we were there. It was horrid, thick, choking pollution. The sun hardly broke through it. And the traffic and people.....far too many for our liking.  And the market food......there was every insect that you could imagine fried and sold by the bag, scorpions on skewers but the worst was the spatchcock frogs on a stick !  

We had already sussed out the cheap taxis and a price was agreed upon for our trip to Sri Nakorn Kien Khan Park the following day. So up at 5am and an hours drive to the park where the taxi driver just kept getting lost. From reading trip reports, the park is almost impossible to find. He eventually located the gates, with the help of a traffic policeman,  and in we went, it was still dark so we had sit and wait for it to get light! We were very keen to get our list off and running and to bird before the heat of the day. The park was fantastic giving us a good 70 species, a few that we wouldn't see again on our trip so well worth it. We were back at our hotel by 1pm. Time for a few hours round the pool and a chapter of my book. We had birds non stop through the hotel grounds, the lawn sprinklers attracted everything from warblers, barbets, sunbirds, herons. 

The following day was Karen's birthday. A lovely day spent at the Temples and then out at the Calypso at night, but I will tell you all about that later and show you our pics.........It was an excellent night xx