Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes: To Bangkok!

After leaving Koh Tao, I took a boat to the mainland tiny town of Chumphon. From there, I took a sleeper train to Bangkok. I am traveling with a Danish friend I met in Koh Tao. It's nice to have a travel buddy. In Bangkok, we went on a day tour out to see the floating market and the Tiger Temple.

The floating market was pretty much a tourist trap, but it was cool. Lots of people wearing funny hats and selling things out of their boats. We spent most of our time wandering around the surrounding neighborhood, the houses are all built on stilts and line the canals. People have boats in their "garages".

The Tiger Temple was also a tourist trap. I guess I should just accept that I am a tourist, and this is the feeling you get when you go on tours. But the tiger temple was cool too, they had a bunch of tigers that you could pet. The tigers didn't look all that excited about it, but I don't think they had much choice. The temple was started by 7 wild tigers that were abandoned by their owners, and the monks took them in (I guess in Thailand if you don't want an animal you can just drop it off with the nearest monk and they will take care of it). The 7 wild tigers bred into 96 tigers, most of which were born in captivity. They are fed boiled chicken, and so haven't had the taste of blood. I guess that means they won't be released into the wild any time soon... The monks use the money people pay to take pictures with them to feed them. Don't know how I feel about the whole thing, but I guess I have some pretty cool pictures now? And the tigers looked happy enough...

Cat nap

The next day we did a proper sight seeing day.
Went to see the reclining Buddha.
And some other Buddhas. Had to get the disrespectful imitation photo...I am a tourist.
Then ventured across the river to the less touristy part of Bangkok. We were headed to a medical museum, which was awesome. It was in a medical school campus, and it was graduation day, so we got to sort of take part in the festivities. Or at least, watch people take millions of photographs and sweat in their robes and hats. The museum was way cooler than I expected. It had a bunch of pathological specimens in jars in formaldehyde (smoker's lungs, ruptured spleens, brains with various things wrong, lots of stillborn babies with birth defects...). It was a little gruesome (very gruesome) but also very informative (the parts that were in english, there was a lot of thai writing). There were cases and cases of skulls of people that had died by gun shot wound, blunt force trauma, sharp object trauma... All very interesting. There was also a series of photos of gun shot wound victims. It's a good way to encourage gun safety. They didn't let us take pictures, but that's probably to the blog's benefit. I might find this stuff fascinating but maybe not everyone would agree?

After the museum we wandered out into a thai market. And by that I mean we were the only foreigners. Sat down in a food stall area to get food only to realize everything was in thai. Can't even start to guess what things were. Some nice old lady ordered us some noodle soup and rice and chicken. Pretty delicious.
Since then, a French Canadian friend I met in Malaysia has met up with me and Morten, so now we are 3. We headed out to Chiang Mai. Stayed here one night, and are looking to head out again this afternoon (although I think we missed the bus). We saw only two things in Chiang Mai before deciding to head out: the night market and the "town's best mojito" (hence missing the bus). Going up north to a town called Mae Hong Son for some trekking.