Shrey and I recently went on a whirlwind tour of Thailand and it was phenomenal! We were only there for a week but didn’t stop moving the entire trip. I’d been dying to go to Thailand for years and had prepared myself by watching YouTube videos and reading vlogs but it’s so much different once you’re there. It was quite a bit more difficult to find vegan food on the road than I had expected, but not impossible.
We arrived in Bangkok at around 3 a.m., but it was well after 6 before we were able to get through immigration and to our hotel. We spent most of the day sleeping and recovering from the first leg of the journey (15 hour train ride to Delhi then a 12 hour wait at the airport before the flight was exhausting). We hadn’t planned anything in terms of what we would be doing or where we’d go, so we took the first day to do a bit of exploring and Shrey found a night bus leaving the next day for the coast. We quickly learned the best way to get around in BKK is by train after stumbling across another Westerner and headed off to the Patpong night market. We still needed to take a tuktuk after getting off at the station, but Shrey was able to haggle to get a decent price (I can’t haggle at all, so he was a lifesaver the entire trip!). Once there, we wandered about the array of goods all the while beleaguered by people asking us if we wanted to see the “ping pong show”. I’ve heard of this show and had no desire whatsoever to be subjected to that imagery, so I would just point to my pregnant belly and say I had a ping pong of my own…which actually worked wonderfully and gave me a good laugh.
After seeing what the market had to offer, we walked down a couple streets and ended up in the red light district. Women were lined up like chattel in matching outfits while men inspected them. It was…unsettling to say the least, yet surprisingly it did not feel like an unsafe area to wander through. Before leaving we stopped at a fruit vendor and bought some durian, a smoothie, and some mango sticky rice. Shrey was not impressed by the durian at all–which just meant more for me!
The next day we left our hotel and headed to the Bangkok Bus Terminal. We actually took the city bus most of the way there and it only cost us 7 baht for nearly an hour’s ride. An older woman noticed I was pregnant and made a younger woman give up her seat to me, despite my protests! It was really sweet but a little awkward, though in the end I was thankful I didn’t have to stand the entire ride. We got to the bus terminal and it was full of clothing vendors and restaurants so we spent the day shopping and got a sim card for my phone (internet for navigation is 100% a necessity). For some reason 7-11s are EVERYWHERE in Thailand and there was one right inside the “mall”! It made it easy to get snacks and drinks for the trip, so we stocked up on all the vegan goodies we could find (which was…not much to be honest).
Our bus came at around 8 p.m. and we had an uneventful and extremely comfortable ride, complete with neck pillows and blankets. They did try to give us packaged food on the bus but nothing vegan (I ended up feeding it to some beach dogs at our resort). We had one stop in the middle of the night and I was able to scrounge up some dried fruit and coconut sticky rice to refuel.
With Love, From India 