AFTER the long wait and the weeks slowly drizzling by, Saturday morning came around for me and Kevin, meaning it was time to head to Thailand. We’d arranged a ‘call van’ to come and pick us up at 5.30am to get us to Incheon Airport in time for our 8.30am flight which would take us to Phuket via Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Despite not going to bed until about 1am because of playing on my Wii and messing around on the internet by the time the van got to Talkster, my suitcase was packed and I was ready to go. As we were driving all the way to Incheon the weather was pretty miserable so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that we were leaving Korea for a week.
We managed to get our plane tickets and get through customs with little problem, neither of us had checked in a bag so we didn’t have to mess around with any of that nonsense at any of our three stops.
Amazingly the first of our three flights was on time and we took off from Korea to travel to Malaysia on the first of three flights which was due to take five and a half hours. The first of our flight meals arrived just as I decided to wake up and it was very much needed as already I was starting to flag! It was still early after all!
We arrived in Hong Kong to a torrent of rain to spend the next couple of hours in the countries only airport. We tried to find our way to the ‘transfer desk’ of the airport and after kindly being pointed in the right direction by a sign we got to the desk to discover that we’d been pointed in the wrong direction. Getting to the second place we were pointed to the queue we were in to get through customs decided to back-up and we were soon told that due to a ‘malfunctioning door’ we’d have to go back to the original desk we were pointed in the direction of. Heading back there we discovered another ‘door problem’ and were then marched halfway across the airport to a door that appeared to be working! (We never did discover that the problems with the ‘door’ were but we figured that was a code for someone trying to bring someone through the gate that they shouldn’t be.
Speaking of which when we did get through passport control and had our bags checked the few women in front of us decided that they were going to try and bring a drill box full of plants through which did hold things up a little bit but with two and a bit hours to spare it wasn’t exactly a serious problem! Taking off from Hong Kong to get to Malaysia, the weather had eased and soon we were on the four hour flight between Hong Kong City to Kuala Lumpur.
On the flight between the two countries we had a bit of entertainment on the plane and not just the choice of films there was to watch. For the second time in two flights the pair of us were told to fill out a health declaration form which was basically checking that you weren’t carrying swine flu. Presumably to ensure against the same thing there was an announcement just as we were about to land that the plane we were on was going to be sprayed to ensure that everyone was ‘clean’. I can’t remember exactly how it went but it wasn’t very re-assuring to be told that if you were wearing contact lenses then you simply needed to close your eyes for 30 seconds and you should be fine. Luckily I was wearing my glasses and I was able to see the ridiculous sight of four members of the flight staff spraying what seemed like air freshener whilst walking backwards down the cabin. Me and Kevin just lucked at one another concluding that the world had gone mad.
We arrived in Lumpur feeling pretty jaded but having only a couple of hours to get onto our flight in the comfort of reclining chairs it wasn’t so bad. Boarding our one hour and ten minute flight to finally get to Phuket we were given some pretty good food including some Ferrero Roche and actually had to fill out a worthwhile health form as we were actually entering the country not being confined to the space of the airport. We touched down in Phuket at about 6.30pm and both of us were feeling pretty tired.
We managed to get ourselves a taxi to the Karon Living Room Hotel where we were staying and after changing our Korean Won into Thai Baht we headed out in the direction of the south coast of the country. As ever when you arrive in a place late at night, things seemed pretty surreal and it was pretty difficult to pick any noticeable landscape features out in the cover of darkness.
After about an hour we got to our hotel and checked in. We decided having travelled all this way that it was time to head towards the beach and then get some food. Even though it was stupidly dark and we weren’t able to see very much of Karon Beach it was pretty obvious that every second of the journey had been worthwhile. Kevin decided to go and check out the water whilst I took in the fact that it was still 90F despite being pitch black.
Both of us as usual were hungry so we headed towards a nearby restaurant and grabbed some traditional Thai food. We took a bit of a walk around the main street of Karon and decided to call it an evening and head back to our hotel after the travelling had worn us both out.
We did have one little shock late at the night when I decided to turn on the light and wiped out all the power to our room by blowing a fuse but we survived through the rest of the evening to enjoy our first day in Thailand.
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