Day 198 (Sun 21 Jan) - Kanchanaburi / Bangkok

After breakfast had a lazy morning chilling in the garden.

A minibus picked up at 1.30pm to take us back to Bangkok. The journey was only meant to take 2 hours, so plenty of time to get there for our train to Chiang Mai at 6pm, or so we thought. How wrong we were!

We finally arrived in Khoa San Road (Bangkok) at 5.20pm after an awful journey. It had been like being back on the M25. The traffic was horrendous and the driving was scary. When we arrived in Bangkok we needed to get to the train station on the other side of town. We resigned ourselves to the fact that we were just not going to make the train as Bangkok is reknowned for it's mad traffic jams.

We jumped into a waiting Tuk-Tuk and asked him to take us to the train station! He knew we were in a hurry and he did his best to get us to the station in time for our train. He was on a mission and he was loving it. In true James Bond style, he swerved through the traffic, dodged pedestrians and flew down back alleys. It was quite scary at times and any moment we thought he'd welcome the opportunity to master an Evil Knievel dare devil stunt!

Anyway we arrived at the station just in time to catch our train. Found our seats and we were finally able to relax. The train seemed really comfortable. After a tasty dinner, a friendly chap came round and made up our beds. It looked like we were going to have a very comfortable night's sleep.