Monday 18th December - Transit

Airports

You can't fly direct to Laos but we didn't mind as we enjoyed Bangkok during our honeymoon and we were looking forward to seeing it again. Flights to the far east are a fortune over Christmas so we chose to split the flight with a stop and to make it even cheaper we chose to go with Turkish Airlines.

Whoever said “It’s not the destination, but the journey that’s important” has clearly never travelled with Turkish Airlines….or stayed at the Avana Hotel in Bangkok ;o)

Not a fantastic flight….Mel was sat next to Winona Ryder from the film Beetlejuice (or someone who looked, dressed and acted remarkably like her), who proceeded to huff and puff her way through the flight, before disembarking sporting a single white glove (a-la Michael Jackson)….naturally she was travelling “uuutterly alone !!!”.

The flight also saw Melly’s vegetarian meal ‘disappearing’ and taking a good 10 minutes of hunting for another one which was ripped open by the stewardess, given a disdainful sniff and hurled in our general direction. Mmmmm yummy.

Istanbul airport was quite pleasant and so the stopover went very quickly, we were soon re-boarding the plane for the final ‘overnight’ leg of the flight.

We arrived at a very new, shiny, and large Bangkok International airport at about 4pm the following day and slightly flagging, but still fairly bright-eyed, we hailed a taxi, which took us to our hotel.

Unfortunately the ‘quiet top floor location’ turned out to be directly below the hotel ballroom, which was setting up for an evening event - apparently ‘Animal’ from the Muppets was on drums, so we facilitated a quick change of rooms to a much quieter floor and got our heads down ready for our early departure for Laos the following day.