We are in Udon Thani !!!!!!

Thursday - 8 May 08

Well here we are in Udon Thani and its a pretty cool place. Its a good stop off point for people that have been on the go travelling and need to chill. Apparently not many tourist and especially backpackers come here because its so close to Nong Khai and think there is nothing to see or do, but its a huge city or province as they call it and we reckon its pretty good.

We picked up our laundry this morning, had breakfast and checked out of our hotel around 10.30am (check out and check in time in Thailand is 12 o'clock). We caught a Tuk Tuk down to the bus station, bought our tickets and hopped on the bus for our one hour bus ride to Udon Thani. The trip was good after all it was only an hour but when we arrived at the bus station here no one spoke english and couldn't seem to get the Tuk Tuk driver to understand where we wanted him to take us. I had it written down on paper the name of the guesthouse and the address but we were an hour hanging at the bus station while he tried to get someone who could read english so he would know where to take us, what a freakin nightmare. Eventually someone got a map out and showed him where to go but that didn't help any as we spent nearly a bloody hour driving around the city trying to find the place, in the end he got the shits and so did we so we got out, paid him 300 Baht, freakin rip off and sent him on his way. We crossed the road to and found another Tuk Tuk driver who managed to understand where we wanted to go and we were there in 5 minutes. Unfortunately they were booked out but they rang ahead and managed to get us a room at The City Lodge & Bakery, it is 800 Baht per night ($30 Aus) and of course it is there low season so they will sell their most expensive rooms first. I was a bit pissed at having to pay that much as its the most amount we have had to pay so far for accommodation but when we saw the room, far out you could put ten Thai families in it. Its massive with a proper bathroom with separate shower recess, western toilet which you can actually flush toilet paper down, free wireless internet which meant we could use our laptop finally, air conditioned, toilet paper and the best of all Tea & Coffee making facilities, woo hoo! we can make our own coffee and drink it all day, and its central to everything, even the hospital is right across the road, so it was worth the extra it cost us.

The first thing we did was throw our gear in the room and head to the nearest shop to buy bottles of water, longlife milk and Rick paid the housekeeper to give us extra sugar so we can have coffee, coffee and more coffee.

Tonight we went to the Central night markets which are 2 seconds around the corner and they are wicked markets and massive we only walked through half of them as we are saving the other half for tomorrow night. We walked a block or two further on and found this huge Cinema complex with shopping centre and it seemed to be the place to be because there were shit loads of people there, and guess what, there was KFC, Sizzler, Pizza places, Donut shops, Ice Cream shops and we were in heaven. We had KFC for dinner and tomorrow night it will be Sizzler. We bought ourselves some donuts for supper with our coffee and we ate ice cream while we walked back to the hotel. Rick loves the place, I think its excellent too! even though its hard to find Thais that can speak or understand english.

We will stay here until Saturday and then catch the bus to Bangers (8 hour trip) and then onto Jomtien Beach (3 hours) but this place like the others will be hard to leave. Rick and I have been discussing maybe extending our trip by another month and spending 3 and a half months not 2 and half as originally planned and even longer if we can find a way to do it. We have been told that if you do a border crossing when your visa is due to expire get a 30 day entry visa stamped on your passport coming back in and when that 30 days is due to expire do another visa run and get another 30 days, we will need to check that out and if so we will be able to stay longer. Our current 60 day visa runs out 24 June and we will do our planned visa run into Myanmar to get our extra 30 days so if we can do another one we will be laughing. It would be awsome to stay longer. As we are now homeless for a while, at least until October we don't need to hurry back to Aus.

I have taken almost 200 photos and if I can work out this friggin camera I can maybe post photos on this blog but I am not too smart with digital shit or adding stuff on computers so have to ask others and then try it myself and that could take some time.

Well thats it for today, hope everyone is well back in Oz. Until tomorrow!!!