Bangkok

Bangkok
July 12-July 14

We said goodbye to India in style with a lovely meal in a classier restaurant complete with Indian karaoke. Honestly I wonder, in the push to westernize, if Asians will ever learn to copy completely.

Bought some more stuff in India that we thought we might miss and then we set off for our last night in the glorious country. (Although it was in Calcutta we had some decent digs!)

We woke up early in the morning to catch our flight. The door was locked and we couldn't get out of the hotel. I knocked on the door of a room where the precious day we had seen the hotel manager sleeping. Well...no one answered. Banged on it a couple more times. Oh dear! A cute foreign boy answered with messy hair...like maybe he had been roused from a sleep at 6am! Oops!

The manager was camped out on the floor in a little room next to the entrance. sigh.

We escaped and made it the airport. We tried to get into the check-in section of this really small airport. Nope. Your flight doesn't actually exist!! WHAT??? We would have had to travel 2 days back to Manali where we bought the tickets. Thankfully it was just an error on the part of the travel agent.

These are the things that I won't miss about India. Although there is a certain element of entertainment!

After boarding the plane and having a questionable meal the captain made the landing announcement. Twyla and I looked at each other with surprise. It had only been an hour...and we didn't understand the name of the city we would soon be touching down in.

It was somewhere in India still. Everyone involved in the flight plan had negated to tell us that this was not a thru flight and that we could add an hour to our time of arrival (in addition to the 45 min that the flight was late leaving India). This was compunded when we arrived to the Immigration line ups in Bangkok. We were right after a flight from Taipei and it seemed more than a bit wierd to be amongst short Chinese people yammering away in Mandarin again.

All the delay may not have mattered had we not arranged to meet Daniel (from Taiwan) in Bangkok about 2 hours earlier than we arrived.

We checked into a guesthouse and then headed off to try our luck in finding him. As this area of the city isn't too big it took about 10 min for him to spot us. We had a few drinks, caught up, then called it a night.

Next morning I left Twyla sleeping and headed for the salon. Spent 5 hours getting my hair done and am feeling sufficiently more human than I was when I left India. We did some shopping and arranged a few travel plans. We were wandering around with grasshoppers (duty free liquor is a beautiful thing) when we stumbled upon a restaurant that played movies and an interesting South African writer. He writes travel and experience columns for Vogue and such, has been all over, lives in Bangkok, and has some interesting insights into life.

Today we are leaving Bangkok and heading to Chang Mai on an overnight bus. It will be interesting to compare the travel conditions of India and Thailand! Bangkok just doesn't do it for me and we learned that we can get our visas in Chang Mai for just a smidgen more (which we will save by not staying in Bangkok).