Bagless in Bangkok
We flew from Leh back to Delhi to spend one night near the airport before our onward flight to Bangkok, and unfortunately our Indigo Flight didn’t put ANY baggage on the plane at all… So we all arrived in Delhi with delayed bags. Since we were flying out the next day, it seemed unlikely we would get our bags in time, so we requested Indigo to forward our bags to our hostel in Bangkok…. Eeek!
We arrived in Delhi and headed straight to the mall to pick up some essentials like underwear, toothpaste and brushes, shampoo and other toiletries, and also headed to Decathlon to grab a few t-shirts just in case.
Strangely, the roles were reversed and for once, I was the pessimistic one, I was convinced that was it, and we’d never see our bags again… But Dave was optimistic, so we just stuck to these basics and waited it out.
Fortunately, Bangkok is a wonderful city to wait. It’s probably my favourite city that I’ve been to so, and I think Dave’s too. It’s very green, clean, well organised, has tasty food, and Thai people are really nice. Coming from India where everything is dirty, disorganised and chaotic (for instance, there was no queue at the baggage desk in Delhi for the missing bags, and since everyone on the flight had the same issue, it was literally every man for himself trying to file the claim form… Very stressful), well, what can we say, it was bliss!!
We’ve both been to Bangkok before, for me, I have been here a few times now, 10 years ago backpacking for the first time, and then I’ve been back twice over the last years. So I had been to all the major tourist sites. And since we only had a few items of clothes, we just spent the days chilling in the city. Visiting malls, parks, eating tasty food and chilling… And also messaging Indigo a lot to get status updates on our bags.
We took a quick jaunt to the giant Buddha temple, wat Paknam Phasi Charoen, but unfortunately it was covered in scaffolding ☹️
Low season is great, as there are fewer tourists, and you get amazing deals on hotels (plus the weather is still fine here), but we did notice A LOT of refurb going on, and scaffolding on a lot of the major sites.
After 2 days in Bangkok (3 days of no bags), indigo told us to go and collect our bags from the airport as they were ready and delivered……. In HONG KONG!!! 🫣 We have no idea why the bags got sent to Hong Kong, but they did, but at least we knew where they were… We waited 2 more days, and on the 5th day they were finally delivered to our hostel! 🥳
We celebrated by going to Sukhumvit to play pool and have a few drinks.
The next day we moved hostel to stay in the China town area, but I have to say, the hostel we stayed at near Phaya Thai was amazing, the guy was helpful with our bags, but the bed was very firm and neither of us could close the door whilst we were on the toilet as our knees got in the way haha, plus we wanted to stay somewhere new.
China town was great, I’d actually never been there before. It was quite touristy and very busy, but we loved the hustle and bustle. Loads of street food stands, and unfortunately also lots of shark fin restaurants 😞 but we found a couple of nice vegan places.
The last day, we took a boat along some of the more narrow canals off the Chao Praya, which was really cool, we went past some of the temples we’d visited in the first few days, but seeing from the boat on the river was a nicer way to view them I think.
We got a lot of public transport here, it’s so easy in Bangkok, you have the SkyTrain from the airport, (and we stayed close to Phaya Thai to make use of it. Then you have the BTS, which we used every day. And even water taxis which as very cheap, we used the Chao Praya boat a few times.
That night, (in the pouring rain!) we visited some of the nightlife in Yaowarat region, which is kind of famous for it’s “hidden bars”. We went to Ang Yi, and got cocktail. Dave got the special, where you used the Chinese traditional fortune telling stick shaker to shake out 3 descriptions of a cocktail. Dave got “rum”, “strong” and “fruity”. Which I guess is kind of right 🤣
We both love Bangkok, but what we both love even more is the nature and wildlife of the beautiful country, so since we finally got our bags back (never letting them out of our sight again…) we continued the adventure… Next stop, Khao Yai National Park!!
