We decided that we would spend the last day of our holiday in Bangkok.
We had not done much touristy stuff on land, having spent most of the holiday under the water.
We looked in the guidebook where it said there was a large temple just 5kms from our hotel. We thought that would be a nice easy walk, and we could see some of the city on the way.
We put te destination in Google maps, it confirmed that it was just over 5kms to the temple, so we started walking.
It took us 2 hours to get to the temple, when we got there it said we had travelled 11kms! Our feet were a bit tired!
On the way we passed through China Town, where everyone was busy cleaning out their shops and workshops ready for the Chinese New Year.
There were buckets all along the streets where people were burning bundles of fake money for luck.
We saw a Chinese Dragon with drummers visiting stores collecting money.
The temple we visited is called Wat Pho. It was built under the orders of the king when the moved the capital of Thailand to Bangkok. As part of the construction he ordered that all abandoned Buddas from around the country be collected and brought to the temple. He also order the construction of a huge reclining Budda, which is now the second largest of its kind in Thailand.
We spent a couple of hours looking at hundreds of Buddas and hundreds of spires.
When we went outside we tried to get a taxi to take us back to the hotel, but none of them would take us. We could not understand why not, until we found out that they would have to take a large detour because of the Chines New Year celebrations.
We eventually found a tuk-tuk who agreed to take us back, and even take us to the Lucky Temple on the way.
After the visit to the lucky temple he asked to see the hotel address again, then told us he could not take us, so he dropped us on a busy junctio near a taxi rank. We were standing looking puzzled when a man on a motorbike pulled up and pulled out his ID, he was a tourist policeman and he told u sthe bus we would need to catch to get back.
We stood in a bus stop for a while, but the bus number we wanted never came. We went and found another tuk-tuk taxi, he agreed to take us and we headed off.
We got back to within about 2 kms when the driver said he couldn't go any further.
We ended up walking the rest of the way, stopping at a bar on the way to rest our feet for a while.