After watching movies like Long Way Round, we gained the concept that traveling to other countries was a long, tiresome trip. So when we arrived in Seoul, Korea 12 hours after leaving Portland, on Wednesday morning, it felt very unreal. In another 6 hours, we were in Thailand , making it be11:30PM on Thursday! I’m sure your first question would be, “Is their airport different?” and my answer would be, “HECK YEAH!!”

We were greeted with a hot, humid wind seeping through the cracks of the air-conditioned breezeway to the airport where we followed the herd of other passengers on their way to retrieve their luggage. We quickly found out there was no such things as lines and taking turns, but rather how many people could squish into a small area and get through the inspection first.

Once past customs, we went to get our luggage and watched the belt carry away suitcase after suitcase, but not ours. We searched and searched and just before complete panic set in, we noticed one of the local workers had loaded our luggage on a cart and was ready to take us to our waiting taxi.

What happened next was we acted like magnets with our main concern being to keep up with the man pulling our luggage as taxi drivers tried to sell us their services for, “Very cheap. Safe Taxi”. Before we knew it, we were standing outside where it seemed we were the only ones. As we tried to ask about or hotel’s complimentary taxi, a taxi driver was nearly packing our luggage into his “Safe taxi”. David ran down to check with the hotel checkpoint at the other end of the airport to check on the status of our taxi while Phyllis and I remained as magnets to our luggage. Being as we were passing on that taxi, the luggage carrier took us back into the airport, rechecked our baggage through the scanner having us walk back through the metal detector just to take us in a circle back outside to meet David waiting there in our hotel’s taxi. We were starting to think, “Ahh, the chaos is over,” but we had thought to soon. Just as the Thai culture treats lines and taking turns different, they are no different on the road.

We watched in shock as our driver weave through the right and left lanes, often straddling both. At this point, the fact that they drive on the left side of the road had little effect on us. Almost like flies, the drivers on scooters followed us very closely, sometimes close enough to touch if we had only had the guts to roll down our windows. There were sometimes 3 people on scooters, no helmets and going about 80 kilometers down the turnpike. At one point our driver tried to kiss the scooter in front of us with his bumper. As he steadily kept 1-2 feet from the scooter, we asked why and he responded, “They are in the wrong lane, they shouldn’t be here.” He went on to tell us how many scooter accidents there are and that they should take care of themselves. YIKES!

Finally, we were at the hotel, Sino House. We checked in, scurried to our rooms where we saw the comfortable beds and barely laid down before we were out cold. We had only been here 2 hours.

View Thailand – Getting There Gallery