hello again, hope you are all well. we've been in bangkok for about 10 days now - a lot longer than we had intended to stay. However the extra time has been unavoidable. We arrived here at 6 am after an overnight bus from Krabi, and trudged off up some dark alleys looking for a cheap guesthouse. Fortunatley we found one very quickly, cheap (good!), clean (what a bonus) and with puppies (shei was ecstatic). The owners' dog just had 7 puppies a couple of weeks ago, so they were very small and cute. Shei'a maternal instincts took over so she has been huging and kissing and playing with them everyday. The mum dog checked shei out to start off with but she realised that shei had the best intentions so now shei is allowed to play whenever she wants - which is very often! Entering and exiting the guesthouse always takes a lot longer than normal as shei loves to sit down on the floor for some puppy time. I'll be honest , they are damn cute, and a lot more adorable than the rats and cochroaches in the surrounding streets. The weather has been better then when we first were here, now at least it is bearable although a few cold showers a day is a necessity. It rained a few days ago which really cooled things down so that the weather was even pleasant but it has warmed up again. We ran into our old mate Gary here. We had intended to meet up with him the next day but the day we arrived we bought a map of the bus system and sat down to read it and gary just walked on up and said hello. it was great to meet him and we hung out for a couple of days before he had to go back to pakse. he is really looking like the S.E. Asia veteran. Armed with a few useful phrases that gary had taught us we took on the bangkok bus system and found it surprisingly easy to use. It is super cheap and pretty damn efficient, although at some times of the day it is incredibly slow. Standing on a stinking hot bus, crammed with people , for 2 hours as the bus inches its way along is not too much fun.
We went to the Argentine embassy to extend shei's passport and found them to be incredibly firendly . they did it in less than an hour and asked us to come back and hang out with them whenever we wanted. i don't think they see too many argentine backpackers over here. they were super friendly. went over to the lao embassy and got some visas. a mission to get there, but all done in a few hours. lao is our next major destination. also went and saw the enormous wat po and the national museum, which i am sure is fantastic, but the day we went was so hot that it was painful to move!
However the reason we stayed so long and the inspiration behind the name of this journal entry has been due to STA. STA bondi junction fucked up our tickets so that they expired on the day we left sydney. even though the flight details were correct, the tickets couldn't have been used. Fortunately we had to go to change our last leg and we found this out. It took sta bangkok a few days to confirm from sydney the proper details of our flights. during this process we also found out that QANTAS had cancelled our flight from singapore to india. it seemed that they were not going to give us anything else, so we had the choice of flying singapore to london (a missing out india) or buying some more tickets to cover the deleted flight. buying the tickets would have straetched our measgre budget to breaking point so we decided to not do india. finally we found out that QANTAS would give us the missing flight on another airline but we were now psyched to spend more time in south america so we changed our tickets. Our plan is now 6 months in se asia, 1 month in spain and then 5 months in south america. So this is good news for all our families and friends reading this from south america, we will be there sooner than we had expected. We wil fly out of singapore in mid july for a month in spain and then be in argentina in mid august. this new plan will give us extra time to explore south america, hopefully we will be able to go to places neither or us have been to. Unfortunately it also means that we will miss out on india, which is a real bummer as we had both wanted to check it out after hearing so many amazing stories from our firends. It'll be our next trip , and by the end of this one we'll have enought frequent flyer point to get there and back.
Today we take the night train to chaiang mai, we had wanted to spend some time there but that time was eaten up by the hassle over our tickets, so after a couple of days there we head to lao. Not sure what the availability of the internet is like up there so it may be a while till our next entry.
hope all is well whereever you are reading this
love sasha and sheila
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