Lighter Bags, Looser Plans in Bangkok
Less weight, more options, the journey continues.
“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” – John Lennon
We arrived back in England and finally had the chance to reorganise our bags and offload a lot of gear. Things that made sense while we had a car in France, but wouldn’t work for the next leg of the journey. From this point on, we were committing fully to backpacker mode.
After quite a bit of messing about, we managed to sell the car. We were running out of time and had to let it go for a bargain price. So my master plan of buying a car in the UK and selling it when we returned did not work quite as neatly as I had hoped. Still, even with that loss, it worked out far cheaper than renting a car for the whole time.
In true backpacker style, we took a taxi to the train station and stood waiting with all our possessions around us. Everything we would be carrying for the remainder of the journey, however long that might turn out to be.
From train to plane, a two-hour stop in Doha, and then on to Bangkok, the travel itself was smooth and uneventful. It was the first long-haul flight we’d taken since 2011 and the first that the girls could remember.
In Bangkok, we had booked two nights in a hotel near the airport so we could relax and recover from any jet lag. The hotel sent a minibus to collect us, and the girls were very impressed to find it fitted out with neon disco lights on the inside. It was a surprisingly cheerful welcome to Thailand.
After two lazy days near the airport, we were ready to head into central Bangkok, where we had booked a place for the week near a large green space called Lumphini Park.
It is about here that I should probably introduce a subplot involving Australia.
My wife and I met in Australia. I moved there in 2002, and she was travelling for a year with her cousin. We met through mutual friends and, to cut a long story short, ended up getting married and having our first two daughters there. Our third was born later, after we returned to the UK in 2011.
Because of that history, all of us except the youngest already had Australian citizenship. I was the only one with a current Australian passport though. While we were in France planning the Thailand part of the trip, we realised it would be nice to keep Australia as an option. Somewhere familiar for the kids, even if they barely remembered it, and potentially a place where we could slow the travel down for a while. Maybe even work for a bit and rebuild the travel funds.
As we arrived in Bangkok and watched the Bitcoin price heading south rather than the expected north, that Australia option started to feel more important.
We’d planned it so that our hotel, near Lumphini Park, was also very close to the Australian embassy. With all the paperwork we had thankfully brought with us, we booked appointments to renew the girls’ Australian passports.
After several back-and-forth visits over the following weeks, we got everything sorted. That meant all five of us could head to Australia if we wanted, with the youngest covered by a twelve-month multi-entry visa. More on that in future issues.
For now though, we were in Bangkok.
We spent our days and evenings exploring the many night markets that spring up across the city. An endless mix of food and things for sale. Some weird, like fried scorpions, and some far more familiar, like rice topped with minced meat and a fried egg. Night markets usually start around 4 or 5 pm and are incredibly cheap. Meat kebab sticks might be 10 or 20 baht, around 24p to 48p. Add a small bag of rice for 15 baht, about 36p, and you have a meal for well under a pound. If you really want to treat yourself, throw in a fruit smoothie for another 35 baht, roughly 84p.
The shopping malls in Bangkok are also something else entirely, the best I’ve ever been to. Our favourite was one called Terminal 21. Each level is themed around a different country, and the food hall on the top floor, Pier 21, turned out to be one of the cheapest places we found to eat anywhere in the city.-
Some of our regular choices there, with prices converted from Thai baht:
Mango sticky rice: 84p
Pork and rice: about £1
Pad Thai: about £1
Coconut water: 84p
Fruit juices and smoothies: 48p to 84p
We could comfortably feed all five of us, often with two or three dishes each, for around £12 to £14. We went there more times than I can remember.
A Day Trip to the Siam Museum
We visited the Siam Museum, which I would highly recommend to anyone visiting Bangkok. It is an excellent introduction to Thai history and culture. You are given an audio headset on entry that guides you through each room, and the whole place is very interactive. It helped explain a lot of the things we had already seen around the city and gave useful context for the rest of our time in Thailand.
We had planned to visit the Royal Palace as well, but it was closed on the day we went, due to ongoing mourning following the death of the Queen Mother. Instead, we took a long walk back along the river before jumping in a taxi back to the hotel.
Off to Bang Saray
A friend of mine from England lives in Bangkok and has been recommending we visit a place called Bang Saray for quite some time. It is a small fishing town about two hours southeast of Bangkok and 30 minutes south of Pattaya. We finally took his advice and booked a villa there for five weeks.
Bangkok is great, but after a week, I like the idea of going at a slower pace. Constantly booking flights, hotels, taxis, train etc for the last 3-4 months, and we are starting to get travel fatigue. It’s starting to feel like we can’t relax; we constantly have to be researching the next part of the journey.
Looking back, this leg of the trip has felt like another process of letting go. Selling the car, shedding gear, and adjusting plans as reality nudged us in different directions. It has also been a reminder that flexibility beats prediction. Prices move, plans shift, and being able to adapt matters more than being right.
Bangkok has been bright, loud, crazy, cheap and full of energy, and quite a culture shock after France. We leave it lighter than when we arrived, both in what we are carrying and in how tightly we are holding the plan. Next, we head to Bang Saray for a longer stay, hoping for fewer decisions, a steadier rhythm, and a bit of breathing room.