My first impression of Thailand was Kao San Road in Bangkok, the backpacker quarter.

Even if it is really crowded and full of backpackers, for me it was like being in a hassle-free zone again. On this street (actually in the whole area) is the business organized in at least 2 lines. The first line are the houses, mostly guesthouses, restaurants, internet cafes, bigger shops and loads of travel agencies. The second line which is just in front of the first one is separated only by a small sidewalk (pavement). Here are mainly small street shops, every shop about 2-3 meters.

These shops are built up again every morning, so late at night or early in the morning, it's possible to find the shops in the first line and the streets look really different then. At these street shops you find mainly cloth, hammocks, sarongs, walkman, watches, bags, cheap jewelry and a lot of other stuff.

But it is also possible to get a fake international student id or a diploma here. (Why did I study so hard, it's so cheap here to buy the documents). In the 3rd line (sometimes also in the 2nd line) you find (moving) food stalls.

Here you can get Patthai (fried noodles with vegetables), fresh sliced fruits, pancakes or some grilled meat for 10 Baht (about 25 cents). But even better than the cheap food are the fruit shakes for 10 Baht. It is very easy to get addicted to Patthai as a main dish, water melon or pineapple or a pancake as desert and a coconut shake as drink. This makes about 30 Baht and in Austria you would have to pay for that at least 400 Baht.

If you eat the same stuff here in a restaurant it is of course also more expensive, about 30-40 Baht for a fruit shake. But if you order it in a restaurant, you can watch a movie in the meantime. Almost all restaurants on Kao San (there are a lot) show the latest movies on dvd. Fortunately they provide a list of the movies of the day in front of the restaurant and just a few minutes before a popular film starts the restaurants get filled with tourists and as soon as the film is over the waiters bring you your bill. A pretty cool system.

If you don't want to eat in a restaurant or on the streets, there are about 6 24hour supermarkets, like 7 Eleven on Kao San. If you think now that this must be a very long street, you're wrong. You can walk it in about 5 minutes (in the middle of the road). So it is actually crowded, but still hassle free. You can walk next to the shops and even watch the offered goods without anybody trying to sell you that stuff. They only ask if you really start behaving like a buyer. So the shop men don't hassle you with their goods and even better they are not trying to be funny by greeting every girl with "Hi Honey" or "I love you" or "You are so beautiful". Maybe one reason for that is that there are also a lot of woman working in these shops.

So Kao San (and also most of Thailand) is hassle free, especially when you just arrived from India. Then everything is just nice, clean, well organized. So if you afraid of a culture shock in Thailand, go first India. If you survive there, Thailand will be a very calm place.

BTW, I just saw the movie "The Beach" here and their picture of the Kao San Road is really exaggerated. But maybe it will be a bit worse during the high season. Now it is low season but still most of the cheap places are booked. So if you want to come to Thailand, don't watch that movie. It's a lot better here.

But Bangkok is not only Kao San Road, it is also a lot of temples & shrines, markets & shopping centers, and streets full of buses, ferries, water taxis, normal car taxis, tuk tuks (similar to Indian autorikshaws, but bigger) and my favorites - motorbikes. That's the fastest way to get around town and you also see a lot more. But the cheapest way to get around are buses and ferries. The buses are very slow as they hardly go exactly where you want to go and there is always a lot of traffic, so they are often stucked. The ferries and river taxis go along the main rivers and canals and are quite fun and always full with Thais and monks. There are always special seats on the boats reserved for monks.

I don't know how many temples (wat) are there in Bangkok, but even if you just travel with the bus for 30 minutes, you will at least see 2 or 3. Most of them are rather small and the living place for the monks. But of course there are these really big and so beautiful ones. There are also monks living there but they are also a major tourist attraction and so you have to pay a entrance fee there. They always have at least one big Buddha statue there and a lot of very nice buildings. I especially liked the roofs. Next to the one big Buddha are often a lot of smaller ones. (It's a lot easier to make pictures of them.) I don't know the meaning of the different sculptures and buildings in the temples but they are definitely very impressing and you should at least see some of them when in Thailand.

So I spent my first days with sightseeing. Fortunately I was not alone, as I guess I would have been too lazy otherwise. But so they just took me to Auyathaya, the former capital of Thailand where we saw a lot of temples and Buddhas within 3 hours.

After sightseeing, relaxing and watching a lot of movies, I went with the bus to Koh Tao. We left Kao San at around 9 p.m. and arrived in Chupon at 5 a.m. After about two hours of waiting, we went with a ferry to Koh Tao.

First we came to the main tourist street with a crowded beach and lots of tourists. After some minutes there I decided with two other Austrians to go to another beach which description sounded really good in the leaflet. The beach was Ao Leuk and it was really beautiful there.

Sandy beach, clear water, corals and only a few bungalows. The drawback was that it was pretty small and during the day a lot of diving schools came there as it was the best place on the island.

There is one restaurant with some bungalows directly on the beach and 2 more a bit more uphill. The bungalow I got was without sea view but it was a lot cheaper than the rest. Some of the others had an excellent view and if you are not travelling alone it is good value.

There were no shops on this beach so you could only eat or drink in the restaurants but you could rent a motorbike and drive to other parts of the island. Another good feature of this beach was a little reggaebar, where they played music all day. So it was a nice background for lying on the beach and read. At nights and during the rainfalls (normally once a day) all the tourists set there and had some drinks. It was a really nice place with very friendly people.

After some days relaxing I decided to do a dive course and so I swam to the diving boats of the smaller companies. One of them was pretty cool and so I had a check dive where I had to do all the skills again and then a pleasure dive where I even saw a sea turtle. I did snorkeling in this area before but during the dive I saw a lot more fish and corals.

As the diving school was based at another beach (Chalok Bay) and free accommodation was included, I had to move there the next day. The new room was pretty cool and more expensive as my bungalow and the beach was also nice but very flat. The good thing about the new beach was that there were Internet and shops close by.

The diving course itself was pretty exhausting as I did 2 dives on the first day and 3 dives on the second day including a night dive. In between I had to read a lot of theory and fill in a test. After that I really needed a rest but instead of resting I went with a night ferry to another island, Koh Phi Phi. The boat trip was not nice at all. We had mattresses to sleep on but due to heavy sea it was really hard not to throw up. After some hours the sea was smooth again and so I could get some hours of sleep. At 4 a.m. we arrived in Suratthani where minibuses brought us to the pretended bus station. But it was just a travel agency where we had to buy tickets to Krabi or Koh Phi Phi. So after another waiting time we went to Krabi in a minibus with a very unfriendly driver. He was definitely the most unfriendly person I met on my trip. One of the tourists touched due to his height the AC on the roof and wanted to fix it himself. But the driver just got mad and yelled at us.

From Krabi we went with another ferry to Koh Phi Phi, which is really nice and a very good place to watch the tides. During high tide there is almost no beach left and when it is low tide the beach stretches for about 300 more meters into the sea. During low tide you hear little crackling noise all over the place which is produced by small crabs living in holes in the sand. They just get out of their holes and in again all the time. I also saw a lot of colorful butterflies, a lot of shells and some monkeys (who were attacking me).

Koh Phi Phi is cheaper than Koh Tao (except for dive courses) but as there are so many more restaurants and bars I spent a lot more money there. In one of the clubs there is a Thai Boxing fight every night and one night I decided to watch it. I don?t like boxing at all but those Thai boxing guys were really cool. They were slim with muscles you don?t see and the fight was mostly with legs and arms. It didn?t look as brutal as normal boxing looks like. After the fight the boxers went to the people and shaked hands with every one. The handshake was very soft nothing you would expect from a boxer.

After Koh Phi Phi I spent some more days in Bangkok doing almost nothing and then I moved on to a fantastic trip to Myanmar.