Bangkok

The flight to Bangkok was 9 hours; a little longer than the 4 hours I'd somehow got into my head, which barely gets you over Australia. I was expecting a lot more chaos than what I found but it was an exciting change of culture and the first golden Buddha's I met were fascinating. 

I did a little sight seeing at the Grand Palace and Temple of the Emerald Buddha: a gaudy, opulent collection of big golden shrines and ornate buildings. The highlight was the vast mural that surrounds the main temple area, depicting the epic story of Ramayana.

 

I had a night out down the crowded tourist haven of Kho San Rd, enjoyed a couple of cocktails 63 stories up at the Red Sky bar and went for a little hand surgery in a hospital... 

I'd had this small growth on my right hand since I fell on a spiky tree in the dark in the Amazon. I thought I'd dug all the splinters out at the time but one remained slightly swollen and developed into a small hard white blob. I thought it was probably infected but a course of antibiotics in Peru made no difference and it didn't seem to be getting any worse. Still, with a few weeks in Myanmar coming up and Nepal to follow I thought I'd better sort it out while there was still good health care available. 

So I went to see a doctor at the hospital. He had a prod around and not sure what it was, advised to cut it out there and then. With a little local anaesthetic he did just that and removed what turned out to only be a lump of thick skin. A little non-plussed after cutting the lump open and finding nothing he had another look in the open wound. 

"Ah ha!"

And with that he pulled out a big splinter of about a cm length that had been deeply buried in my hand for the last 7 weeks. The hole left in my hand required stitches and I've been cleaning and dressing the wound daily for the 10 days since. 

My amazonian hitch hiker

Hand fixed I carried on to Yangon on the Tuesday for a few weeks holiday in Myanmar.