Bangcooked

Wow it's hot here. Drinking so much water it is amazing!!! Had a rather bureaucratic few days trying to rearrange flight/sort out visas etc. We now are the proud owners of 2 Myanmar visas and are coming back on 18 July to Heathrow.

At first we moved into the Khao San road, a backpacker haven - cheap t-shirts and lots of tour companies. The first few days were awful - people telling us visas weren't possible because of the holiday and that there were no seats on the plane back to the UK (stranded in Thailand until 10 Sep). We got past these though and escaped the Khao San chaos and are now lodged in a leafier markety area to the north of the city called Thewet.

Thewet market appalled Els, with loads of live animals snapping at her as we walked past. We happened upon our 1st wat, which was spectacular (pics to follow).
On Sunday we went to the weekend market, which was MASSIVE and had eveything on sale (even kittens, so we were stuck there for a while). It proved difficult to find Els some veg to eat, but everyone is so apologetic and tries to cater for her. She ended up having a salad covered in salad cream - yum. We spent the evening on a pub crawl and went to a jazz club, which had the big bands from the posh hotels playing new stuff for free. Then we ventured into Soi Cowboy, which needs to be seen to be believed. Unimpressed by the seedy western men and naked girls, whose hearts definitely weren't in it, we were challenged to a game of Jenga by a rather scary transvestite with gigantic implants. Ellie bragged about the unsurpassed dexterity required in our everyday lives as brain surgeons (a little too much Grey's Anatomy I think). Then I proceeded to knock it all down and we lost the bet - it turns out she is a Jenga master during the day.

We fly tomorrow to Yangon...more to follow and hopefully some photos.
Bye for now, Jamie