Our stop in Bangkok was meant to be short and mostly filled with arranging visas, but as we pored over 5 Lonely Planet guides at breakfast the day of arriving we came to this harsh realization. Each visa takes 3 - 7 days to process and can't be done simultaneously as each embassy has an urgent need to to have our passports in their bureaucratic hands. So we decided the best thing to do was to get one visa (Vietnam - since it pretty much can only be done in Bangkok) and fork out a little more money and get the other ones done on arrival. Still, we had a few more days than expected in Bangkok, but you really couldn't be in a better place for such a thing to happen. Bangkok is a really exciting city. Sure it has a tonne of bad points (most notably out of control traffic) but it has the air of a city with momentum. Sarah and Dan visited Bangkok three years ago and they could really notice the difference. The Sky Train (elevated urban railway) started service, the cab drivers are less harassing, and there are a tonne of people (not just backpackers anymore) touring the city. All these are signs, we think, that the city is starting to calm down after a development craze and is starting to exude a more settled, comfortable standard of living than before. Amongst the four of us we debate the place of development everyday (the good and the bad) but you have to say it is heart warming to see people better off and enjoying amore comfortable life than they were before. (Any objectors to this statement?? Email us!!)

So we enjoyed the atmosphere and took in a few of the sights. Of course we went to the Grand Palace, the glittery tourist stomping ground that makes everyone's list. While gaudy and golden the place really is beautiful, especially against a blue sky.

Other sights we chose to see were the Floating Market a hundred kilometers outside Bangkok, the Jim Thompson Silk House, Siam Square (the center of Bangkok's newest malls and the place to be seen shopping or eating), and Chinatown and Little India.

And after four days of wondering what they could possible be doing with our passports there at the Vietnamese Embassy, we got them back at 6 pm, promptly headed to the train station and caught the next train to Ayuthaya, the first stop on a bike trip up to the north of Thailand.