thailand - suphanburi to be exact

i am sooooooo behind in my blog... i am now in thailand, i've got many photos to post and stories to tell - i've just been really busy travelling and recovering from my jetlag. on the whole i'm having a truly great time here... travelling alone has it's advantages and disadvantages. advantages are that you only have yourself to deal with... so you can do what you please when you want. also if you get stressed out and cranky whilst travelling there is nobody to argue with. i wish sometimes though that i had someone to share these amazing moments with. like now i'm staying in a really nice hotel called the sri u-thong grand in suphanburi, north of bangkok. i ended up here quite by accident. i wanted to go north towards pripanolot. i slept a lot this afternoon (after the elephant ride) and ended up getting to the bus terminal at about 4pm. i took the local bus... that's what they call the buses here that are not super fancy and designed for farangs or westerners. on the bus were a bunch of school kids and other women going home after work. it was a fun and crowded bus ride... the bus came complete with disco lights (inside) and _amazing_ speakers - talk about pimp my ride! and the driver played some thai pop music... we rode through a couple of heavy rain clouds - got really wet closing the window... and then i arrived in this town supanburi - there were no further buses going north - so i ended up with the bus dropping me off at a hotel only to find out that this one was full because there is some sort of big sport competition going on here. so luckily, on hand was a motorbike with a sidecar to whisk me to another even fancier hotel - the sri u-thong grand. it is really nice! and the most expensive place i've stayed in here yet. it's 900 baht a night - which is about $24 or 12 quid... a real bargain considering how gorgeous the room is.. their are glass elevators too and a thai lady singing songs in the coffeeshop and remote controlled light settings, cable tv etc. etc.

the irony is - i had originally decided to take the local bus because i thought it would save me money and also to get away from the western tourist scene... so now i know what it is like to be in a place that doesn't cater for back packers/tourists and where every single sign you see is in thai. i wonder how the early western travellers in the 60's got on (before there was a backpacker's scene)... did the thai people open their homes to them? did they
stay in luxury hotels, sleep on beaches or under palm trees. i'd love to know.