Before we even left Beijing, I declared how sketchy I thought this Couchsrufer was, but didn’t prepare a back up plan. Because we were running late, we had to meet her in the heart of the city with all our stuff, which was only 3 backpacks, but considering how packed Bangkok’s city center was, it was impossible to walk freely. Needless to say, upon meeting her she says, “Where are you staying.” RED FLAG!! Then she tells me it’s 300 baht per person per nig ht to stay at her boss’s place way outside the city. No thanks.
We parted ways and she used poor English as an excuse for not telling me, but I told her that’s not a good excuse. So now we wandered around Bangkok at 11:30 pm on New Year’s Eve with no where to stay, 3 heavy backpacks, and millions of people on the streets pushing and pushing. We went to Central World and celebrated the countdown…with all of our stuff with us. After midnight, it took several minutes to take one step, so it took us a while to make our way to Lumphini park where we thought the protest was, but it was empty. I was prepared to sleep in our sleeping bag until I saw a cockroach and got a few mosquito bites. Unfortunately, we were in the fancy part of town with only 5 star luxury hotels that we couldn’t afford.
Luckily, the concierge at the Best Western made a few phone calls and got us a taxi to a Thai hotel called 13 Coins. I was more than happy with the room even though the concierge strongly warned against it because it wasn’t for foreigners. It wasn’t super pretty, but it was clean enough and comfortable, but most importantly it was affordable and had free wifi. The restaurant downstairs was really good and had a great watermelon shake. It was our first one in so little did we know that it would be the best watermelon shake in Thailand.