Day 128 – Chiang Rai.

We had a few hours left with our bike (Barbara) so after breakfast we decided to take it out again. We popped back to Central Plaza to pick up a few things we didn’t get yesterday and then went for a short drive around the town. We feel quite sad to hand her back as we became quite attached to it. Felt like a local because we just hopped on it and rode around wherever we wanted to go!

The next few hours were spent just chilling in the hostel as Chrissy wanted to get some drawing done for work, which gave me a chance to write some of this as I haven’t in a few days.

We then walked down the road and went out for dinner, which was really disappointing! As you know I like to look on Trip Advisor for places to go and I found some recently opened burger place by an Australian guy. I thought this must be good, I was totally wrong. The food was bland and terrible but the service was amazing. I should probably just copy and paste this as a TA review right now. After here we walked around the Night Bazaar (market), which was also disappointing. Everything was overpriced and no one wanted to bargain with me. I think because it’s here every night they don’t really care. This made me even more gutted about missing out on last night’s market.

The final thing I wanted to see in Chiang Rai was the Clock Tower show. There is a roundabout with a clock tower on it and on the hours of 7, 8 and 9pm it has a light and sound show. Imagine the Disneyland castle but smaller, basically the same thing. It was a cute little thing and went on for about 5 minutes. Once that was over we went back to the hostel to pack up all ready for our flight to Bangkok early tomorrow morning!

Day 21 – Queen Victoria Market.

7:30am - This has to be the earliest I’ve woken up since leaving Perth but it was all for a good reason and that reason was breakfast (and to see Valerie)! Valerie’s flight back to Sydney was at midday so we arranged to meet at 8:30. Eventually I found the right Crown hotel entrance (why make a hotel so big?!) and we were on our way.  We only walked around the corner to one of the restaurants on the southbank, it was a pretty chilly start to the day but it soon brightened up. After a lovely catch up it was time to say goodbye but I shall be staying with Valerie when I’m in Sydney in March so it’s only bye for now.

I walked back to Flinders Street where I jumped on the free tram to Queens Street to make my way to the Queen Victoria Market. This market runs 4 days a week and sells pretty much everything; fruit, vegetables, clothes, souvenirs etc. Shruthi had said about going to this market so she came and met me. When the market started to close, this is when it really came alive! People snatching up every last bargain they could and fruit being sold by the boxes for just a dollar or two. Absolute mayhem!

We still had quite a bit of the day left and we weren’t quite sure how to spend it. We had mentioned about going to the cinema before so we looked at what was on around us. The Wolf of Wall Street is the film of the moment so we decided to go and check that out at the Holgs cinema in Melbourne central. Although it was quite a long film (3 hours to be exact!) I’m not quite sure what to make of it, the whole thing was pretty crazy really.