19 degrees, rain
We left Sydney on a cold and rainy day and had a smooth 9 hour flight to Bangkok on seats with extra legroom which I had forgotten I’d booked, so that was a nice surprise.
We arrived at Bangkok airport and made our way to the Domestic departure lounge through the chaos that is the arrivals area, for our flight to Phuket which was four hours later. Not sure how, but we managed to get tickets giving us entrance into the Bangkok Airlines lounge so peace and quiet resumed for a while but it was a long wait.
The flight to Phuket was only one and a half hours, but very noisy with one screaming child delaying take-off because they wouldn’t sit in a seat on their own, unfortunately they were just behind us! We eventually landed at about 10 pm, which is now 3 am Sydney time, and through the chaos that is Phuket airport we found our pre-arranged taxi to take us to our hotel, apparently another hour and a half journey. The taxi was a fairly tacky mini-van and the driver naturally didn’t speak English and five minutes into the journey stopped at a fuel station to have a fag!
We both decided we needed to stay awake for this journey although we hadn’t the faintest idea where we were going and the driver was the usual Thai kind, foot down hard to accelerate, then coast, then accelerate, etc till we felt like nodding dogs in the back of the vehicle.
Two hours later and still miles from Krabi and driving down a dark road surrounded by jungle, an alarm sounded in the car and the driver pulled over and turned the engine off! Just what we needed, a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, in the dark. The driver rooted around in the centre console and found something which he pressed and then tried the engine again, which thankfully started. Definitely a worrying moment or two there!
Another half an our later we arrived at our hotel but as it was now well past midnight the place was fairly dark and empty and we’ve been awake for 24 hours. However the night staff were very welcoming and quickly showed us to our room, which looks lovely but we didn’t spend any time looking around, just climbed into bed and fell asleep straight away.