thewills'wanderings

Well, here we are in Bangkok. After a slightly stressful few days leading up to our departure, we arrived here at about 11.30pm on Thursday night.

For those of you who didn’t hear about our last minute troubles, I’ll fill you in.

First of all there was the political trouble in Bangkok which made the news and warnings were given to tourists to avoid Bangkok and postpone unnecessary travel. While we didn’t want to overreact to the warnings we couldn’t ignore official advice and thought seriously about whether we could delay flights until things calmed down. After lots of time on the phone to the airlines and insurance companies things did calm down in Bangkok and we decided to go ahead with our plans cautiously and avoid the centre of Bangkok.

So, with one day to go we were all set to do our final pack when Maddison started vomiting, following soon by Tim who doesn’t do things by halves, so decided he’d do the diarrhoea thing with aching joints. Then, Michaella decided to get in on the act and she started vomiting. So, here we were at 8pm the night before we leave and it was all looking very bad! I couldn’t imagine how we were going to cope with 14 hours of travel with half of us sick. Once again I was back on the phone to the airlines and the insurance company this time looking at delaying our flights because of sickness. What a drama! We managed to put flights on hold for 6 days later and I went to bed feeling more than slightly relieved that I didn’t have to fly with all of those sickies.

Then, the morning came and the kids were all full of beans and pretty much recovered. Tim was still not right but decided he could cope if he could sleep on the plane and not have Charlotte next to him.

(cunning plan, don’t you think?)

So, we were all on again and we had to do a mad final pack to get to the airport by 10.30am.We did it! What a relief to get on that plane! We had a pretty good trip to Bangkok with Charlotte coping amazingly. Check out the photo of her asleep on the luggage as we left the airport at midnight! Tim improved as the day went on, much to my relief, and so far no one else has got sick.

We were met at the airport by 2 guys from the guesthouse we’re staying at whose names are Bird and Bank, (much to the girls’ amusement) and they took us and all our gear at high speed(eek) in two cars to our guesthouse. We finally all collapsed into our beds, very thankful for the air-conditioning with the temperature 33 degrees at midnight.

So we are now all settled in at the Sanawan Palace, an amazingly cheap and cheerful guesthouse (it even has a pool!) on the outskirts of Bangkok.

PS. Does anyone know why when I type in Word then cut and paste onto the blog, pargraphs never come up. Even when I edit it on line I still can’t get the paragraphs – very frustrating!!!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.