Finally flight number 3 & the shortest flight of them all is finally here, it's only 2 hours & 30 minutes! Music to our ears! We board through gate 207 at 1.15am, Hong Kong time & are ready to go earlier than our scheduled 2pm departure. We are so excited to get to Bangkok, arrive in our hotel, shower & sleep!
The plane arrives on time, neither of us have slept on this flight & are feeling worse for wear.
Hello country number 22!
Which is also my first ever country that I visited with my best friend when we were 18.
Thankfully immigration is easy, Australian & New Zealand citizens don't need a visa for 30 days & customs is not even a thing. I am finally reunited with my art cylinder! It's unscathed & I'm so relieved to see it again. When this papyrus is finally framed & safely hung on the wall of our future house, I'm gonna pop a bottle of champagne.
It's 4.30am by the time we make it out of the terminal & walk towards the taxi line. There's a bit of confusion as to which taxi we should take, our hotel is very close by & there is an option for a short distance taxi, but we just don't know if we're eligible.
It turns out we are, we find out after going through the regular taxi line & getting an offer from the taxi driver for 500 baht, which seems ridiculous to me. The short distance taxi only costs us 250 baht.
Thankfully immigration is easy, Australian & New Zealand citizens don't need a visa for 30 days & customs is not even a thing. I am finally reunited with my art cylinder! It's unscathed & I'm so relieved to see it again. When this papyrus is finally framed & safely hung on the wall of our future house, I'm gonna pop a bottle of champagne.
It's 4.30am by the time we make it out of the terminal & walk towards the taxi line. There's a bit of confusion as to which taxi we should take, our hotel is very close by & there is an option for a short distance taxi, but we just don't know if we're eligible.
It turns out we are, we find out after going through the regular taxi line & getting an offer from the taxi driver for 500 baht, which seems ridiculous to me. The short distance taxi only costs us 250 baht.
Check in is easy breasy & the hotel is nice, new, clean & comfortable. We're showered & in bed by 5am. It's so good, but as jet lag goes, it's not good sleep & we force ourselves awake at 9.30am for our free breakfast. The plan is not to sleep today till after 9pm & try correct our body clocks.
The internet is blessingly fast & I've got big plans to catch up on the blog over the next few days before we get busy again. Including today, we have 3 days to relax & catch up on life admin before our good friends Nat & Dom arrive.
Then we'll get started exploring Thailand.
We make a plan to buy groceries for the next few days & walk the 15 minutes to the supermarket.
We make a plan to buy groceries for the next few days & walk the 15 minutes to the supermarket.
It's at this point I start to get deja vu about Thailand. It has this smell about it, particularly in Bangkok. It's really hard to describe & I've never smelt it anywhere else. Tom tells me about a similar smell he remembers in Bali, Indonesia.
I did a Google search to see if anyone else distinctly notices it. It's a thing, the Thailand stink & it's a mixture of durian, oils & meat from the street stalls, sewerage, garbage & pools of stagnant water rotting in the heat. Obviously, I've just listed some of the worst smells ever, but it's not bad all the time & comes in waves.
The other thing I remember is the absurd amounts of electrical wires suspended in the sky & the absurd amount of scooters, everywhere! Nobody here believes in helmets or weight limitations.
We walk past food stalls, internet cafe's, massage parlours, dodgy bars & shops selling all sorts of plastic crap.
The walkways are a really bad mismatched jumble of nothing, impacted dirt, mismatched & cracked pavements, cement, pipes & bitumen. It's very common to see fish ponds, elephant statues, Buddhist shrines in houses & stores, they are covered in gold paint & hard to miss.
The Thai people are really lovely & many of them smile & wave to us. We're staying in a nice suburb called Latkrabang, which is on the east side of Bangkok & still very close to the airport. There's no road noise but we constantly hear the planes taking off & landing.
Once home from the shops Tom makes us salad sandwiches. For some reason the salad is very bland, no vegetable seems to have flavour. Not even beetroot! We don't realise how lucky we've been Travelling in Central America & Africa, where the food is local & fresh.
Lucky we've also got chips & fruit.
Tom spends the rest of the day watching TV, while contending with an unstable stomach, while I manage to publish 12 blogs & update 3 previous blogs with more photos!
What a day!
The next 2 promise to be just as productive, but it's boring to blog about how you blog.
- Alli
The next 2 promise to be just as productive, but it's boring to blog about how you blog.
- Alli
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