Here’s the final post about my recent trip to Thailand, including some photos of Bangkok and Nongkhai.
In Bangkok we stayed at the Holiday Inn Express, which I highly recommend. It’s right on Silom Road and not too far from a Skytrain station, so going elsewhere in the city is convenient. There is a good breakfast buffet and the staff are very helpful and courteous. We also stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in Phuket, which is about a five-minute walk to the beach. Again, they had a great staff, but the breakfast buffet, though decent, wasn’t quite as good as the one in Bangkok. I recommend it, however, but I didn’t take any photos of it.
The Bangkok Holiday Inn was all spruced up for Christmas and there was this nice tree just outside the restaurant.
There is a beautiful lobby area at the hotel and checking in at reception was quick and easy, and, again, the hotel staff were wonderful.
Here’s a nice reflection I captured on the short walk (about ten minutes) to the Skytrain station.
Bangkok’s lungs, Lumphini Park, is in the Silom area and it’s a great place just to hang out. The citizenry use it for jogging, aerobics, tai chi, free concerts and walking around, enjoying the greenery. I’ve got quite a few other photos of Lumphini on the blog, which you can see here and here during a protest.
This is a night shot of one of the skylines surrounding the park.
Not far from the hotel, we found this little hole-in-the-wall bar that had some live music on this night, a solo singer/guitar player who was quite good. Here, Nai enjoys a beer (or two).
After several nights in The City of Angels, we headed back for Laos, but first we spent some time in Nongkhai, staying in a small hotel on the river walk. A ways down from the hotel, the town had set up some New Year’s decorations. Here are a few.
There are several places along the river where you can walk down to restaurants that are set up on boats. Here’s a nice one.
Along the river walk are numerous sculptures of the various fish that can be found in the Mekong River. Here are a couple of the fish out of water that could be seen from our room.
And finally, there was an elephant strolling down the walk, with its handler, of course. He was selling tidbits of some kind that you could feed the animal. Elephants are probably my favorite animal, but this is not the place for them. You could see them quite often down in Bangkok in the Sukhumvit area, but the city outlawed their presence in the concrete jungle quite a number of years ago. It’s not a good environment for the poor creatures and their handlers, who probably come in from the forest where they work helping loggers, but are now jobless.
That’s the last of my Thailand photos from the vacation I had. I didn’t take that many photos of Bangkok because I have numerous other photos of the city posted on the blog. Just use the search function if you wish to see more.
