cheap yet expensive vacation – Bangkok (part 4)

Tuesday-Wednesday, October 8th-9th 2013

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Two hours flight brought us to Don Mueang Internatioal airport in Bangkok. Our destination is Millenium Hotel Hilton in the city, and we can either take bus or taxi to get there. My friend, who had looked and asked in a forum before about transportation in Bangkok, suggested that we should take “cab with meter”.

Get out of the arrival gate and turn left, you will find queue of people lining up for taxi. All these taxis over here are using meter and I think their cost is reasonable.

From airport to our hotel we had to pay around 400 Baht (including toll and tip). We considered this cheap, because when we were at the airport, we tried to ask for a kind of minivan to take us to the hotel, and they said the cost is around 1000 baht.

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Our hotel is located beside the main river in Bangkok that Bangkok people uses as their medium of transportation. That is why, when night comes, we could see from our hotel all those boats with its beautiful lights moving along the river.

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Having had refreshment in the executive lounge, we decided to pay a visit to one of the favorite shopping center in Bangkok, Asiatique. From hotel we took free shuttle boat to this Central Pier (near BTS Saphan Taksin). Then, from this pier, we took another free shuttle boat (provided by Asiatique-has asiatique flag on it) to Asitique.

Asiatique (view from the boat)

Asiatique basically is a big shopping ground with many places to eat. One tip from me for shopping here, look around first and ask for the price, and you will notice that the price range can be so much different between one store with another for the same products, even when that stores really close one to each other.

a garden somewhere in the middle of Asiatique

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The next day, we started early and aimed at visited favorite tourist spots in Bangkok..

ticket to enter Wat Pho

you can give your donation – inside Wat Pho temple

view of the structure from somewhere around Wat Pho temple

After Wat Pho, our next destination was Grand Palace. This palace is actually a complex of buildings at the heart of Bangkok, not far from Wat Pho. In fact, it is located across the street. But you will have to turn around to the other side of the wall to find the entrance.

Just for information, to get into this complex you will have to pay 500 baht.

One of the building in The Grand Palace

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From Grand Palace, our next destination was Siam Ocean World. The fastest way to get there is by using taxi and that’s what we took. However, when we stopped one of the taxi with meter written on top of it, the driver insisted on not using the meter but asked for 500 baht. His reason was the traffic was bad at this afternoon, so the cost with meter would probably the same. Even though we are not entirely sure with his explanation, we decided to board on his taxi.

Along the way to our destination, I kept looking at the GPS in my iphone. Looks like he’s telling the truth because the distance is far plus the traffic that afternoon was terrible. We were almost happy with this good decision that we had made, until he suddenly asked us to get down. He said that we are close and asked us to cross this road in front of us using a bridge that he pointed and we will get to our destination. Well, we knew he was lying. The real reason was because if we had used meter, the cost would have been more than 500 baht, and he did not want to incur losses. But what can we do, we can’t really argue with him anyway, so we just accepted it..

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Siam Ocean World and Madame Tussaud were two places that we would like to visit around that area. After my friend did some searching, he concluded that buying ticket from http://www.hotels2thailand.com is cheaper that buy it on spot, and that’s what he had done. He had bought our tickets online and so we can enjoy those places without have to line up again for the ticket.

@ Siam Ocean World

shark(s)

pretending as a singer

with the founding father of Indonesia

with super genius Einstein

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We closed that night by watching Calypso Cabaret Show at Asiatique.. 🙂

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atampubolon