Back to Bangkok, then Beijing, then London

2005-12-02, London, United Kingdom

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Well I made it back to Bangkok relatively safe and sound after the worst bus trip of my life. The stretch of road between Siem Reap and the Thai border is notorious for its crater like potholes and bridges prone to collapse. It wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting but it still sucked complete and total donkey balls. At times bouncing around like I was inside a pinball machine was kind of fun. After two hours it was growing a little thin. After six hours I was ready to kill the bus driver. After 9 hours I was ready to kill everyone and everything ever created. At one point while negotiating a particularly rough patch of road I bounced out of my seat and smashed into the aircon nozzle above my head. It didn’t hurt too much but I felt a trickle of blood down my forehead almost immediately. So the rest of the journey was spent with a towel on my head and a hand nervously holding the roof in case of more bad potholes. I am at least happy to report that the aircon nozzle came off second best!
Once over the Thai border I was on another bus and a nice smooth paved road all the way to Bangkok.

I spent just under a week in smelly old Bangkok. And yes, it sucked a great deal. Any traveler will confirm that Bangkok is a bit of a hole at the best of times… but after four months traveling the region it was horrible to go back to.
The first night I met up with Jim and Muffin and had a bit of a bender with a very very shady visit to very very shady Patpong (area associated with sleaze). It was a good laugh but I saw some fairly cringe worthy things! The second night I caught up with Dickie and Adele from home. Another big night ensued. For the rest of the time I was pretty sick and did S.F.A. I was stuck in Bangkok due to a ticket mess-up (mostly my fault) and aside from running around trying to sort it out I did very little. After a fairly miserable week I was finally on a plane out of there.

I had originally planned to spend a week in Sri Lanka and China respectively before flying to London but as I took my time a bit to much in Cambodia I had to reduce China down to a day and cut out Sri Lanka all together. The only problem was that my ticket from Bangkok to China was via Sri Lanka and despite all my best efforts I couldn’t get out of going via Columbo. So I flew to Sri Lanka (three hours), sat in the airport for four hours, then flew back to Bangkok (another three hours), sat there for an hour, then flew six hours to Beijing! Stupid I know, but it couldn’t be helped. After a fairly cold and stressful night in a hotel in downtown Beijing I was back at the airport where I waited almost twelve hours for my flight to London. As you could imagine at this stage I was pretty bloody sick of aeroplanes and airports but sadly my torture wasn’t over. It was nine hours to Qatar (a tiny Arab nation near Saudi Arabia) where we had a six hour stopover and then another seven hours to London. By the time I made it to Curt’s house in suburban London I was pretty dazed and stupidly jetlagged. My mammoth forty eight hours worth of travel took me to five countries and covered roughly twenty thousand clicks. Give or take a thousand. But it wasn’t too bad as all the planes had TVs in each seat with a pretty good selection of movies and I managed a fair bit of sleep. Plus I had Wil with me for the China to London leg so at least I had some company. My only major gripe was the food. It was OK quality but two solid days worth of it plays havoc on the digestive system.

Although its frickin freezing here it is good to finally be in Europe. Geez I’m glad I had those jackets made up in Vietnam… although I really should have remembered to bring some warm socks. Lesson on European weather No. 1- Tennis socks and sub zero temperatures do not mix!