It was chaotic. We saw it from a flying taxi.
Let me explain without delving into too much detail. Our flight was late arriving, there was 1.5 hours worth of traffic to get across the city in under an hour. We negotiated an inflated fare for a taxi that flew over and around unprecedented traffic. We broke numerous rules to get into the only Air Canada office in our immediate past, present and future countries to fix a ticket routing problem. Welcome to Bangkok!
We inadvertently displayed socially incorrect manners: shock, annoyance and forcefulness: “What do you mean we need our actual passports to get into the building? We have photocopies?!? And we have 5 minutes before the office and our only window of opportunity closes and we have no other chance to fix this!”
We were asked for bribe money (and ignored the request). Then, we were miraculously and fortunately graced by an Air Canada employee who let us past the guard dogs and resolved our re-routing issues by staying 45 minutes overtime on the start of her long weekend. (Truthfully, on a larger scale, it was the least Air Canada could do considering our multi-continental ordeal and hours of futile and ridiculous telephone conversations endured to modify our flights....). We were very grateful and relieved nonetheless.
In all the chaos of logistics we missed the start-up meeting with our new travel companions. Fortunately, we managed to catch-up with them in time for dinner. There were Kiwi's, UK-ers, Aussie's and Canadian's (dentists, teachers, caregivers, engineers) - newbie and experienced travelers alike. Our guide was a very sweet and soft-spoken local named 'Dream'. We all got along extremely well, and made fast friends. At dinner, Evgueni and I started to relax at last, finally changing gears from Cambodia and the aforementioned bureaucratic chaos and slowly easing right into Thailand mode.
No comments:
Post a Comment