Our travels began with the epic journey to Bangkok via Dubai. We flew with Emirates on the brand new A380 which, after years of using European budget airlines, was a holiday in itself – great free food, free booze, staff that don’t act like you’re a huge inconvenience to their day etc.
The seemingly infinite choice of movies was also supplemented by on board cameras you could watch; pretty boring at 38,000 ft but great fun at take-off and landing!
Everything on the journey was fairly uneventful, except we nearly got on the wrong flight out of Dubai. We attempted to board the flight to Bangkok at the time we were due to leave, but the staff (correctly) told us it we had the wrong flight number and we had to get on the departure for Hong-Kong. The flight number matched the HK flight but I was still a little nervous! It turned out that our flight stopped in Bangkok but continued on to Hong-Kong, like some kind of enormous flying version if the Magic Bus (minus annoying students & raving lunatics). Why Emirates put another direct flight to the same place on at the same time I have no idea. Possibly just for a laugh, to catch out tired travellers at 3am.
Anyway we got here safe and sound on Saturday morning. There are a few options to get from Bangkok Airport to the centre including a rail-link and taxis. I was exhausted and didn’t fancy trying to negotiate a new enormous city for the sake of saving £1 so we jumped in a cab – if you are in a pair or larger group this is by far the easiest way to do things.
“Where you from?” The driver asked us.
“Manchester.”
“Ah Wayne Rooney! Van Persie!” He exclaimed. At least he had his football priorities right.
It transpired his driving priorities were to imitate a Hollywood car chase – weaving from lane to lane with about 2 inches space between vehicles, never indicating. At one point he took off his taxi driver shirt (at 70mph) to reveal a Barcelona shirt underneath – not one for the uniform I guess.
We both sat back in dazed entertainment, passing an enormous Pepsi billboard featuring the aforementioned Man Utd stars covering the entire side of a building, and the crazy motorway soon gave way to gridlocked traffic. Ali was dozing off and I was fighting the urge to in the Asian sunshine. Our brilliantly crazy driver pulled out a bag with three decent sized leaves in, removed two, pulled the stalk from the middles and started chewing away – as you do. He then started plucking his eyebrows and even got out of the cab at one point to grab a drink from a shop nearby!
We got dropped at the end of the backpacker hive of Khao San Road – total cost for the 45 min journey was 500b (£10) – and looked to seek out a beer and some wifi to figure out where we should stay…