Living in Bangkok with Two Lurchers

As we were getting ready to depart the UK nine months ago, people were really waking up to the impact that single-use plastic was having on the environment. We were already very accustomed to the 5p charge for carrier bags in the UK which had seemed very effective, there was general uproar when people realized that disposal coffee cups could not be easily recycled so were inevitably heading to landfill, and then the videos of divers swimming through seas consisting of more plastic than water was making people think. Culture Shock So being in this mindset, and then arriving in Thailand, where being able to carry everything in your possession in plastic bags is seen as a basic human right, was a bit of a culture shock. I definitely read somewhere that it was almost some kind of law that takeaway food and drink had to be packaged so that the purchaser could carry it with one finger! This means that Thailand has plastic bags in all shapes and sizes for any scenario. When we fir...

We’ve had a strange few weeks in Thailand which have really centered around two major rescue operations, albeit one which got slightly more media coverage than the other. Tham Luang Cave The first and most well known of these was, of course, the Tham Luang Cave story where twelve young footballers and their coach were finally rescued in a daring operation after more than two weeks underground. This grabbed the attention of the World and social media seemed to pretty much explode with people desperately trying to be the first to post ‘breaking news’ which probably wasn’t actually accurate anyway. Although I very actively followed the whole thing on Twitter, what was quite interesting is that people in Thailand didn’t actually seem to be talking about it all that much. If this scenario had happened in the UK, I’m sure everyone would have been chatting about it non-stop at work (probably interspersed with talk about ‘football coming home’). But I just haven’t really witnessed t...

We spent a long weekend in Kanchanaburi province recently and it was awesome! I would highly recommend it to anyone visiting Thailand - even a day trip from Bangkok is possible. I would say it's a place that has something for everyone - history, landscape, activity, relaxation and great food! Here's a summary of our favourite parts of the trips: 1 - Bathing & Feeding Elephants This was our activity on the first afternoon in Kanchanaburi and it was pretty indescribable. I had not really seen many elephants first hand before, I can only remember the elephants in Parc de la Tête d'Or in Lyon which, to be honest, looked pretty miserable in their concrete enclosure. I have since learned that these elephants ended up being rescued by the Monaco Royal Family after being condemned to death for suspected tuberculosis. They didn't have TB in the end but one of the elephants has since died of chronic kidney failure. Anyway, our afternoon was spent at the Elephant H...