September 24: Bangkok
Up early, quick breakfast of baguette and tea, and off to the airport. We flew from Phnom Penh to Bangkok today. We can enter Bhutan by air only through Bangkok or Kolkata, and when we were planning the trip, we decided that Bangkok sounded like more fun. A complicated flight schedule left us with eighteen hours to kill, so we locked up our bags in Suvarnabhumi Airport and ventured into the city.
We only spent five hours in the Siam Square market area, so perhaps I should take care making generalizations, but Bangkok seems to me to be a truly cosmopolitan city. It’s enormous–perhaps as big as Manhattan, though I have no Internet access as I write to verify this–and much more organized and cleaner than Phnom Penh, which, frankly, was kind of a pit.
Thai drivers drive on the opposite side of the street than we do in the US, so it took me a few minutes to get the lanes sorted out. Fortunately, I wasn’t driving; I probably would have killed us. Traffic got fairly heavy in the downtown area, but we didn’t have to go too far into the lunch-time crowds. The cabbie dropped us just outside of a very swanky entertainment complex, which you can see here.
Unsure where to go, we stopped at one of the many tourist information booths to ask for directions. The woman in the booth–we’ve dubbed her “Wanda”–was very helpful getting us on our way. Also, posted on her booth windows was a tourist alert warning us to avoid this and that scam. The item that jumped out at us though, was the warning that nothing in this city is free and that if anyone offers us anything for free, we should decline and walk away. Boy were they not kidding! I couldn’t even find free Wi-Fi anywhere, not even in the airport.
We spent the next five hours shopping in this upscale market district, having lunch at the Hard Rock Café (that’s for you, Randy) and hanging in coffee shops. I got my frappucino fix! Yea! I bought a hat for around 8 bucks or 250 bhat–the Thai currency. It’s kind of a bowler/fedora thing. It may show up in some later photos. We haven’t had to deal with currency exchange until now; Cambodians took US dollars. I feel like I’m in high school again trying to do math in my head. Jan bought a great pair of shoes, and Tony bought a shirt. Here are some street shots around Siam Square.
The day has been a long one, so we came back to the airport on the early side. Tony and I both now have colds, so rest sounded mighty inviting. My plan was to check in with Mark and then take a nap. Unfortunately, that’s when things got complicated. Earlier in the day, I found a router in the airport that would give me fifteen minutes of free Wi-Fi, but now, I couldn’t find it again. While I was looking, Tony and Jan double checked our itinerary and discovered that somehow, we’d crossed signals with the agent who booked the Bhutan portion of our trip. She booked us on a flight back to Bangkok later than the one that we expected to be on, and the later flight arrives too late for us to make our connection to Phnom Penh (which we booked separately based on the earlier flight). Our Bangkok-Phnom Penh carrier has no flights after the one we booked, so they can’t get us back to Phnom Penh in time to make our flight to Seoul. Now we don’t know how we’re going to get home. I’m sure that we’ll figure something out. I’ve e-mail our agent to see if she can move us up to the earlier flight or to a flight on the previous day. We’re waiting to hear back.
Keep your fingers crossed that we can find a way home without adding $1600 to the cost of the trip.