Books and bookings

The flights, tours and hotels are booked and the books are bought! Despite having visited Kuala Lumpur twice before and travelling there with former residents I felt naked without a Lonely Planet. So I bought the Malaysia, Singapore & Brunei edition along with a copy of the Lonely Planet Bangkok Cityguide.

After looking at maps of Kuala Lumpur I discovered that my sense of direction was 180 degrees out of kilter on those previous trips. That happens when I am north of the equator, being, as I am, from a Southern Hemisphere land. It doesn't help when your mode of transport is mainly the private car and taxi. I'm hoping that the Lonely Planet will give me a better perspective on where I am and what lies outside the window of the transport.

We booked our own hotels in Kuala Lumpur through AsiaRooms.com. The hotel prices in KL are astounding ly cheap, so we decided to treat ourselves on the final night with a stay at the 5 star Hilton for less than the price of many 3 star rooms in Sydney. I've never stayed in a 5 star hotel before. Not only is it adjacent to Stesen Sentral, the terminus of the Airport Express, but the Lonely Planet describes the suite we booked as "boy-toy heaven!"

In addition to the Bangkok hotel and River Kwai tour we also booked a transfer from the airport to the hotel and a half-day tour of the Royal Palace through Flight Centre and Creative Holidays. I wanted to get a historical perspective on the palace and adjacent temple. The other half of that day we can spend walking around the Ko Ratanakosin area, visiting Wat Arun and taking a cruise up the Chao Phraya river.

Thanks to a suggestion in the Lonely Planet I hope that we can strike out and do our own thing on the first Sunday of our stay. The book mentions the Mahachai Shortline to Samut Sakhon and onwards to Samut Songkhran. The opportunity to travel to seaside market towns on a local train sounds like a lot of fun to me. It was only later that I discovered that this was the same railway line featured in a astounding YouTube video of the disappearing market.



There's an interesting photo gallery of the route as well.

Our hotel in Bangkok is also close to Jim Thompson's house and a number of shopping centres so hopefully we can fit them in during our brief stay. I can already forsee us returning to Thailand in future!

There's an allrite in travelling

If you rearrange the letters of travelling you can extract allrite with v,n and g left over (which obviously stand for Very Nice Guy). Allrite was my original user nick for my first ever internet account in 1993. So allrite was meant to be travelling.

Hearing Thai

Yesterday I was watching part of a Thai production called Last Life in the Universe, recorded from SBS. It is about a obsessively clean and suicidal Japanese man and a young Thai bar girl. I hoped to get a glimpse of Thailand and listen to Thai speech. Amusingly, I heard more Japanese and English than Thai!

I was pleased with the amount of Japanese I could understand, but the tonal nature of Thai and my limited listening opportunities suggests that it could be a challenge picking up much before our trip. I would at least like to learn "Hello", "Goodbye", "Please", "Thank you", "Excuse me" and "Sorry".

In contrast, Bahasa Malaysia is much easier with a roman alphabet, spellings corresponding closely to sounds and many words borrowed from English. No wonder it was the trading language of the region. It also helps to have a partner who speaks some of the language as well!

Thailand, here we come!

It's been quiet on the holiday front for a while now. I've been too busy enjoying doing absolutely nothing over the Christmas/New Year period, a time to enjoy your own home and just relax. This week, however, we have started planning again for our upcoming trip to Malaysia.

B has often said that she wants to visit Thailand. As it lies on one of the main routes to Europe it makes a sensible stopover destination. Our only experiences of Thailand are of flying over Bangkok at 11pm, seeing a city still alive and energetic despite the late hour, and of spending a few hours in Don Muang Airport whilst in transit between Sydney and Heathrow. Thailand often features in the news and on television in Australia; it is a popular holiday location for many locals. But I have never had a real feeling for the country, a sense for how the country works.

I do not think that Thailand functions as smoothly as some of the other transit stops, such as Singapore, Hong Kong or Japan, so I've been hesitant to include it on our trips. That's not a criticism of the country, it's just that, after a long stay in Europe, it's not so pleasant to have to negotiate and entirely different way of doing things, of language and of transport options.

However, our upcoming trip to Malaysia is a different style of holiday. As we had plenty of time to spare and have already seen a reasonable amount of Peninsula Malaysia we thought of taking advantage of cheap Air Asia fares to jump across to Bangkok for a few days and get a taste of Thailand.

We are only spending four nights there, so we decided to cheat a little and join an organised tour to the River Kwai and elephant rides. At least it gets us out of the city for a little bit. I took a look at the Lonely Planet Thailand and, while loads of Westerners travel independently, it does involve haggling and negotiating touts and basically I can't be bothered this time. Next time we'll know what to expect, but this time we want to relax. Besides which, we'll be haggling in Malaysia!

The hotel we are trying to book, Siam@Siam Design, looks nice enough and is close to lots of shopping centre and the Skyrail. Bit worried that there won't be enough hawker stalls in the area though. Definitely want to try a lot of the food.

Not certain that we can shop for too much as Air Asia have a 15kg free checked-in baggage limit, so it's travel light! Not looking forward to the unassigned seating scrum upon boarding either. Oh well, as long as we get there and back safely I'll be happy.

So Thailand, here we come!