Bangkok Day 3: Giant Lizards, Skyscrapers, Chinatown and More

On our second morning in Bangkok, we again woke up super early from jet lag. This time, we decided to make the most of it, and started our day with a gym session when the fitness suite opened at 6 am. That's definitely not my usual holiday routine, but we felt better for getting up and doing something rather than trying and failing to sleep. The fitness suite was on the top floor of the hotel and had great views over the city, so it was a nice way to start the morning.

After breakfast, we decided to start our sightseeing in the nearby Benchakitti Park. We had seen a lot of temples the previous day and were keen to see a different side of the city. The park is really beautifully designed and peaceful, and we loved the sky walk, which takes you over an area of wetlands.

Crossing over a bridge, we arrived in another park, Lumphini Park. This is actually a place that my sister and brother-in-law told us about. They also had a honeymoon in Thailand and recommended this park because of its large population of monitor lizards! These lizards are absolutely massive, and we had a lot of fun spotting them going in and out of the park's lake. 

You can take a pedal boat out on the lake free of charge for 20 minutes, which is a super nice experience. We had a great time looking for the lizards and also spotted a little turtle!

We also saw a few lovely cats! When we had our vaccines before travelling, we were advised not to touch cats or dogs in Thailand because of the risk of rabies, but it was still nice to admire them from a distance.

After a coffee break, we took our first tuk-tuk ride! It was really fun, and we were at our next destination in no time at all.

We'd arrived at King Power Mahanakhon, one of Bangkok's tallest skyscrapers and an interesting building architecturally. It looks a bit like a game of jenga! There's a modern mall next door, which we had a look around, and you can also pay to go up to the top of the building, but at 1000 baht per ticket, we thought it was a bit too costly.

By this point, we felt ready to see some more temples, so we decided to take the Skytrain over to Wat Paknam Phasi Charoen, where you can find the biggest Buddha statue in Bangkok, which stands at 64 metres tall. 

Unfortunately, we came at a bad moment, as the statue was covered in scaffolding! However, we still enjoyed visiting other parts of the temple complex.

We took a taxi over to a mall to pick up a quick bit of lunch and then took the Skytrain and metro over to Chinatown. To be honest, this wasn't a place I'd really thought about visiting, but Claudio wanted to see it, as it had been featured on a Chilean TV programme.

While we were in the metro, the lack of sleep really began to hit me, and I was actually falling asleep a bit while standing up. But as soon as we stepped out into the streets of Chinatown, the smell of durian accosted us and woke me up good and proper!

Bangkok's Chinatown is really different to the picturesque streets of London's Chinatown - it's noisy, choatic and crowded. In fact, it's rather like how we imagined Bangkok would be in general, though the rest of the city surprised us with how modern and attractive it is. This is the part of the city where you can find culinary delights such as scorpions and maggots on sticks! It certainly wasn't our favourite part of the Thai capital, but it was interesting to experience.

We had hoped to do some other activity in the evening, even if that was just going to the hotel pool, but as soon as we got back to the hotel, I went to sleep and pretty much slept all the way through to the following morning. After that, my jet lag was finally gone!

This was our last full day in Bangkok, as the next day we took a day trip to see the historic temples in Ayutthaya. Overall, we had a fantastic time in the city, and liked it a lot more than we expected to. It would have been nice to have spent a bit longer there, but who knows, maybe we'll have the chance to go back at some point in the future!

Minimoon in Mendoza, Argentina

I first heard of the term "minimoon" a few years ago, and I'm pretty sure it made me roll my eyes - yet another way that weddings are getting more and more ridiculously complex and making people part with even more money, I thought to myself.

However, a few years on, following my own wedding in December 2024, I in fact did end up having a minimoon myself, though kind of by accident!

Despite living in Chile for most of his life, my husband Claudio had actually never been to Argentina before, and seeing as we had a couple of weeks left in Chile after our wedding, we decided to take the opportunity to go on a little trip over the border to the city of Mendoza.

I got on to the task of booking a hotel on Hotels.com, and discovered that I had two promotions available to me: Member Prices reduced the price of most hotels by a large percentage, and I also had £73 of OneKeyCash built up that I could apply to my reservation. We had a think, and eventually decided that in order to celebrate our recent marriage, we should book the fanciest 5-star hotel in the city, the Park Hyatt Mendoza. This hotel would have been around £220 for a night, but with the two promotions applied, it worked out at less than £90 - still more than we'd generally spend on a hotel (we usually go for budget hotels, like Ibis), but an amazing deal for what we were getting. So that was how we ended up having a rather fancy minimoon!

We decided to go by car, as the journey between Santiago and Mendoza is really picturesque with several interesting sights to see along the way. I took this journey by bus in 2023, and enjoyed it a lot, though I wished I could stop, get out and look at some places more closely. Of course, in the car, we were able to do just that, starting with Laguna del Inca, a lagoon high up in the Chilean Andes, right next to the border with Argentina.

Interestingly, there is actually an Inca legend based around this lagoon. It is said that an Inca king's wife was buried there and that the colour of her eyes turned the water emerald green. Supposedly, you can occasionally still hear the king crying with grief at night...

Despite the spooky legend, the lagoon is a very beautiful place, and very peaceful at this time of year (it gets busier in winter when people come up there to ski). Apparently, you can go kayaking on the water - something we'd like to try in the future!

After crossing into Argentina, we arrived at Parque Provincial Aconcagua, where we could park the car, and walk for a few minutes to a viewpoint, in order to look at the tallest mountain in the western hemisphere, Mount Aconcagua. It's hard to appreciate how tall it is from this distance, but it's still incredible to know that you're looking at the highest point in the world outside of the Himalayas.

We then drove to the official border crossing, which was where we hit a problem. Though we ourselves passed through customs with no issues, the car was not allowed through, as it apparently had an unpaid motorway tax from 2017. We knew this was an error, as Claudio had recently paid all the car's taxes, and there certainly wasn't an outstanding one from 2017 - obviously, it hadn't been correctly cleared from the system at the time when it was paid. But as it was Sunday, we couldn't phone up to ask about the error, so there was nothing we could do. We were beginning to think that we would have to give up our trip, but then one of the customs officers told us we could leave the car at the border, and pay to go the rest of the way in a bus if there were any spare seats. Fortunately, there was a bus just about to leave which had two seats free, so we did get to Mendoza after all! Unfortunately, we couldn't stop at Puente del Inca or Potrerillos Dam as planned, but the important thing is that we got there.

Once we arrived at the bus station in Mendoza, the first thing we did was book our return tickets for the following night. Frustratingly, we had to pay a full price ticket, even though we were only going to be doing less than half of the journey, which did make the trip as a whole a lot more expensive than we were expecting.

But once we got to our hotel, all the stresses of the day melted away. The Park Hyatt Mendoza was definitely one of the most special places we've ever stayed in! It's located right in the heart of the city, in front of Plaza Independencia, and is an absolutely beautiful building.

Our room was also pretty special. It was so spacious (the bathroom was like three rooms in one!) and had all the nice extras you get in a posh hotel, like dressing gowns, fancy toiletries and a Nespresso machine. I think it was my fourth time staying in a 5-star hotel and Claudio's first, so it was really a cut above what we're used to, and we definitely made the most of it!

After settling into our room, we were pretty hungry, as all we'd had to eat all day were the road trip snacks we'd packed - we'd planned to buy a lunch from the vendors at the border, but couldn't in the end, as we'd had to quickly jump on the bus.

Fortunately, in Mendoza, there's a lot of good food to enjoy. As a country, Argentina has a lot of Italian food, as most people there have some Italian ancestry, so we decided to go to a nearby Italian place, Pizzaiolo, where I had pizza and Claudio had an Argentinian steak.

Afterwards, Claudio went for a walk around Plaza Independencia, but I had stomach pains from the long day of travelling, so went back to the hotel for a soak in the bath and a cup of tea in the big, comfy bed. A nice way to end the day!

Our bus back to the border was at 22:00, which meant that we had pretty much the entirety of the following day to enjoy the hotel and the city. We started off with a delicious breakfast at a café called Chiamo, where we had avocado and eggs on toast, freshly squeezed orange juice, Argentinian coffee and a medialuna.

Following a little walk around Plaza Chile, one of the city's squares, we went back to the hotel to pack up our things and check out. But luckily for us, even after checking out, we still had the rest of the day to use the hotel's facilities, including the swimming pool and spa! So we spent a few very happy hours making the most of that!

For lunch, Claudio wanted to try milanesa, a typical dish from Argentina. However, he didn't realise quite how massive the portion was going to be! I had cannelloni, which was also pretty huge but very nice!

We then spent the rest of the day exploring the city on foot, including its squares, avenues, train station and Parque General San Martín. Given that we walked many kilometres, of course we also had to stop for gelato at Famiglia Perin! 

I didn't take many photos, as it was my third time in Mendoza (I first went in 2018 and visited for a second time in 2023), so I could just enjoy the experience of being there. To be honest, I hadn't really enjoyed my first trip there that much; I went on a big coach tour in the middle of winter, and we spent a lot of the time being shuttled from one photo spot to the next (most of which, I didn't find that impressive) and getting on and off the bus. We also stayed in the most horrible hostel imaginable, which didn't help matters! 

The second time I went was a solo trip in order to renew my Chilean visa, and although I had a strange and slightly scary experience of being harassed by another guest in my hotel on my first night there, it was overall a much more pleasant trip. I realised that Mendoza is a city that is perfect for strolling around and relaxing, particularly in the warmer months. I think it's a city that grows on you over time; it's not somewhere with lots of famous landmarks or super Instagrammable streets, but it's a great place to have some good food and drink and take things a bit more slowly.

I actually felt quite sad when it was time to collect our luggage from the hotel and head for the bus station, as I didn't feel like leaving Mendoza just yet - though that probably had quite a lot to do with not wanting to leave the Park Hyatt!

In any case, the bus ride to the border may not have been a 5-star hotel, but it wasn't as far off as you might expect! The seats were huge and could be reclined 180 degrees (why they don't offer this on long-haul flights, I can't understand), and so we dozed off easily during the couple of hours' journey to the border.

We were woken up by the bus attendant around midnight and dropped off on the side of the road to go and collect the car. Fortunately the journey home was smooth sailing, and we arrived back in our Airbnb in Santiago in the early hours of Christmas Eve, tired but very happy!

Overall, I found it was a really nice idea to have a minimoon - it was great to have a (mostly!) relaxing time away together and to treat ourselves with a luxurious hotel stay for the special occasion. I also think it makes sense to have a smaller, lower key trip straight after the wedding and to have the big honeymoon later, which is what we're going to be doing. We did consider going straight from Chile to another destination after the wedding, but I'm glad we decided against it, as it would have been a pretty full-on itinerary. Plus, it's nice to spread out the festivities and have our honeymoon to look forward to for a couple of months! So maybe I'll take back my initial eye roll over the minimoon trend (though I'll still retain it for anyone who flies abroad for several days and calls that a "minimoon" - that's definitely a honeymoon in my book!)

Following our arrival back in Chile, we had another week left to enjoy the sunshine, as well as Christmas with Claudio's family. In total we spent three weeks in South America, and I plan to publish a write-up of what we got up to outside of our wedding and trip to Argentina, very soon, right here on this blog!