We got up early, had breakfast and went for an extended walk around town.  We started at the beach, though swimming was out of he question as the weather was quite stormy.

It appears that Rescue Vehicles and Police Motorbikes can be customized, as they all appear to look different.  Here is a Rescue vehicle.  I have not seen another one like it – but have seen lots of others customized differently.

Ever seen a squid before?  There were thousands drying in the sun – large and small.

We then walked around the back streets where the locals live.  Unfortunately it looks like a bit of a junk yard.  It seems that they too like shopping, but don’t ever throw anything out.

The girls in the photo were walking side by side holding hands when I spotted them, but as soon as my camera came out, one stopped and the other kept walking.

There are tailors everywhere in the tourist centers around Thailand.  The all have very glitzy shop fronts.  However, the shops where the suits are really made are very different.

There are some "interesting" clubs in Hua Hin.

There is a real building boom going on – more cafe’s, accommodation, restaurants and bars everywhere.  Some are very stylish using the local architecture.

I guess this motorbike is quicker to the scene than the fire engine, but I’m not sure how effective it is with only a fire extinguisher.

There are pictures of the king all over Thailand.  Sometimes he is shown using his camera.

This is the Hua Hin railway station -one of the reasons for Hua Hin’s development in the early 1900’s.  It is still actively used – just check out the timetable.

Cool elephant.

At 11:41am we were packed and ready to leave.  We had made a last minute decision to head to Bangkok via Phetchaburi.  We reached Phetchaburi around 12:37pm, but spent another 15 minutes riding around trying to find the site we wanted to visit. This town has some famous architecture (temples) in Khmer style.

After parking the bike, we walked to one of the temples, and Rebecca came up to to me and told me that she thinks she just saw a robbery.  Of course, I was completely oblivious to what was going on, and hadn’t noticed anything.  Rebecca claimed she saw a man ride up on a motorbike, pull out a pistol and demand money from a lottery ticked sales woman operating on the street.  As I took a closer look, I noticed that there were several cameras.  It turns out that this was a scene in something they were shooting (no pun intended).  So we watched for a while as they did it over and over again.

This is one of the temples in the Khmer style – unfortunately covered in a scaffold due to renovations.

This is where we parked the bike – notice that bag on the top box and the tank bag?  They cannot be locked, so we were glad that no-one touched anything.

We couldn’t readily find a nice place to eat, so we bought some snacks from the 7-Eleven store and took them to a scenic spot on the hill overlooking the town.  This place is infested with monkeys, and there are warning signs everywhere stating that the monkeys can be aggressive – especially if you have plastic bags.  Well, I would say that this is an understatement.  At first it seemed as though the monkeys were just watching us out of curiosity – but that was a mistake.  They came to hunt and our lunch was really supposed to be theirs.  The first monkey who tried to get our food was a mid-size monkey who waited for a an opportunity to grab my yogurt.  He jumped very quickly and grabbed it with both hands, but I also grabbed it, and got it back from him.  However, in the process of saving my yogurt, I dropped the chip packet from which I was eating (yes, I am still on my health food diet).  When I bent over to pick up my chips – the yogurt ceased to be mine.  The monkey grabbed it for the second time and was successful.  And then the others thought that they had a chance, and we got no piece at all.  In fact they were showing their teeth, and didn’t back off even when I tried to scare them away.  Several times I thought they might bite my riding boots, rather than back off.  I ended up being worried that they would climb up my body just to get to a plastic bag I was holding as we were packing up.  They really were aggressive.

After we left, we drove past some shops at the bottom of the hill, and we found this scene – the shopkeeper is constantly tapping her stick to ward off the monkeys.  Rebecca and I counted 14 monkeys in this photo.  For example, there are three monkeys on the blue canopy, from which they would be able to easily pounce on the food for sale.

Once we got into Bangkok, we had the usual problem of finding our way across the river, as motorbikes aren’t allowed on the expressways.  I stopped at one place to read the map, and the woman in the foreground came out of the house and asked if she could help.  She ended up getting a friend to drive us to the bridge – it was only 5 minutes, but lots of turns in back streets.  Once we were over the bridge, we knew where to go – but that didn’t really help. It was now 5pm, and we were stuck in traffic.  At one point we moved only 800 meters in 30 minutes.  Even the other smaller motorbikes turned their engines off, as there was no movement at all at times.

We finally arrived at 6:04pm and I went for a sauna and swim before going out and eating a scrumptious Indian dinner.