Pattaya!

Today I took a bus from Siem Reap to Saigon.  We paid $22/ticket for a seat on the Mekong Limousine Bus.  Limousine here can be used lightly, as in this case it entails  enduring 14 hours of bumpy roads and senior Khmer folk laughing hysterically at reruns of "Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean".  My sister and I thought that saving $600 worth of airplane tickets would ultimately compensate for our time (and sanity?) lost, but midway into the trip we began to think otherwise...  But I'm now back in Việt Nam, where thankfully I can read and comprehend everything as opposed to trying to decipher squiggly worm-like script and hopelessly trying to pronounce 15 syllable street names (ahem, Thailand!). I'll miss Siem Reap a lot, but I'll save that for a later post [: Still trying to chronologically document my travels. Damn blogging is hard!

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Pattaya, Thailand

We spent our last day/night in Thailand at Pattaya, since it was the nearest beach to Bangkok (less than 2 hours away).  My sister and I had looked up weather conditions throughout Thailand in order to ensure that we wouldn't end up buying plane tickets only to be caught in a monsoon somewhere, and Pattaya seemed to be our most secure, and cheapest, bet.  It ended up being a bust, though.  The beaches, obviously ravaged by the influx of tourism, were dirty and polluted, and the food! Ohh the food was just not happening. Not much else to say about Pattaya, though.  It's supposed to be notorious for its red light district, but if so then that was concealed pretty well (thankfully!).

 

Stolen from my sister [: The sun setting in Pattaya. Looks are deceiving!

Food quality was so lacking in Pattaya that we had to issue a 'code red' mission on the way back to the Bangkok Airport. Haha.

love,

chau