Well hello there! We are back form the honeymoon and life can officially get back to normal in Manila! I am excited to get some pictures of our trip up and show some images from the amazing places that we visited. We were away for two weeks and visited Thailand, Cambodia and the Maldives.
My husband and I needed to spend a night in Bangkok as part of an overnight layover on our way to Cambodia so we decided to make the most of our 24 hours there and do some exploring. We have previously been to Bangkok and decided to skip some of the more popular tourist areas of town in favor of some nooks and crannies.
Anyone who has done any amount of travelling will agree that the hardest thing to find in any city, is of course what most people travelled there in search of…the “authentic” experience. I grew up thinking Asia meant gorgeous temples and interesting street markets…both of which are easy enough to locate, though you are usually surrounded by so many other tourists it tends to feel less like you are Marco Polo discovering new places and more like you are playing a part in this widely choreographed orchestra of local people trying to convince travelers that they can offer them the “real” Korea, or the “real” Vietnam….and generally you end up staring at trinkets made in some other part of the world and eating food that is slightly more western then you’d really set out for.
So we decided to jump on a tuk tuk and trust that we’d get off someplace that we hadn’t seen before…we ended up in a maze of streets where a Saturday market was taking place…it wasnt your standard “No Money, No Honey” T-shirts or little carved statues for sale however, it was all locals selling antiques, and I don’t mean things reproduced to look old…normally I would assume it was a tourist trap, but we were the only western folks as far as the eyes could see, and no one spoke English even the slightest bit. We ended up finding our way back to Chinatown and then headed back to hotel, but we had a great time in Bangkok, as short as our stay there was.
I will be posting pictures from our trip over the next few days/weeks so here are just a few…
xhdlk