Plane Crazy

It's day 2 and we're up early packed and ready to go, we have our breakfast and make our way past the army of workers pouring in from Venice railway station. Fifteen minutes later we manage to catch the 8.20 bus to the airport to try and avoid the traffic, but there is none, everyone goes by train or boat. We arrive at the airport and make our way to the Ailitala check in desk and wait behind the half wits who hold everyone up looking for passports and tickets in their bags, it's not like it's a surprise, how do they think they are going to check by telepathy?

Four half wits later we approach the desk and tell the woman we haven't any boarding passes, “no problem” she says, surely it can’t be as easy as this, yes it is, a first with the Italians. We head through security relieved and wait in the lounge for a couple of hours, I wrote day 1 blog there not much to do there expect charge your phone there at the free charging points, then spend thirty minutes watching it in case anyone steals it. Fed up, we decide to go and see if the plane is boarding, and to our surprise it was on final call, so we were one of the last people on, you know the ones that every looks at thinking we are holding the plane up, thinking the pilot can take off when everyone is on. We have great seats the first ones after premium economy, no one in front of us and plenty of leg room. The flight goes pretty quickly, mainly because most of the time we are fed numerous snacks, then a satisfactory dinner at god knows what time, all washed down with a glass or two of vino.  

When we land in Abu Dhabi we are told we have to walk to the other end of the airport to get the Etihad connecting flight at gate 51, twenty minutes later and looking for said gate we see our flight at gate 35, I suppose 51 is easy to confuse with 35, teaming with people, I didn’t think you could fit this many people on a normal aircraft? Once the boarding sign comes on we make our way to the plane and queue for ten minutes then when we get to the aircraft and show our tickets we realize that we are sitting on opposite sides of the plane. 
I thought the Italian boarding pass fiasco (Italian word, you work it out) went too well, I was now sitting next to some man who looked like an extra from Lawrence of Arabia and Trish was sitting next to two German women who wouldn’t shut up. I asked the flight attendant if there were any other seats left so we could sit together and she said the plane was full, slowly but surely the plane started filling up and our hopes of sitting together were getting slimmer by the second, until we heard boarding completed. There were two seats the other side of me free, we’re in look I thought, until a straggler turned up to throw a spanner in the works, but the flight attendant asked him to move to my seat and he said yes, I then called Trish over to sit next to me, and would you believe it, another bloody straggler turned up, luckily for us the attendant asked him to move to Trish’s seat so we could finally sit together and once again the reply was yes, another decent person, or just couldn’t understand English and thought he had to sit where he was told.

Once again the flight was uneventful but quick, these stopovers in the middle east make it easier than direct flights, plenty of food and a few more glasses of wine later, we touched down in Bangkok.  There we are met with a wall of heat, and a surly border guard checking our passport and visas, she had the sort of face that would stop a clock, and I mean a Big Ben size clock. Finally, we both get through after her dissecting every centimetre (or inch if you still use old money) of my passport and then we have to go and fetch our colossal bags and head out into the inferno and bumper to bumper traffic that is Bangkok at rush hour.

To be a part of that traffic we took a public taxi at the airport, quite easy really, we went to the taxi desk on the 1^st floor, told them were we wanted to go, they gave us a slip of paper with a cab number and hey presto it was outside waiting. It wasn’t the newest taxi on the rank, probably the oldest by the look of it, but boy could it go when the chances appeared in the traffic. The journey took about an hour, but we spent about twenty minutes looking for the Krungkasem SrikrungHotel, which was on the road with the same name and right next to the railway station, I told the driver all this but he had his own ideas so I let him get on with it.

After a eureka moment of me telling him again where it is (I done this a lot while we were travelling) we pulled up outside and pay him, and where met by the oldest bell boy in the world. He takes our bags to reception, past the mountain of bags that are waiting to be collected by departing tourists, and are met by the receptionist was wasn’t going to break any checking in speed records; by the time she told me everything I forgot most of it. We eventually get our key and turn around and the bell boy is waiting to show us to our room, and gestures us in to the lift and then on to our room. There’s not really much to show us, and he stands there waiting by the door for his tip, well he got his eye wiped because we only had 500 baht notes and he wasn’t worth that, so we send him away with the promise of a future tip when we see him again.

The Krung is a bog standard hotel, clean, near the station connected by a little bridge over the canal, by China town and has decent wifi, although when we read about it on websites, some people said it was in a rough area, but we didn’t have any problems, then again we’ve been down Breck Road in Liverpool at night time.