(Bangkok, Thailand, and Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom)

“One Night in Bangkok”, by Murray Head, was a big hit in 1984. It was written by the guys from Abba, as part of the musical “Chess.” Little did we know that we would soon be living the title…despite not wanting to!

Our long flight from London Heathrow to Bangkok, Thailand (on EVA Airlines, a Taiwanese carrier) went off without a hitch. The food was great, as was the service, and our seats were comfortable. We were supposed to have a break of just over four hours in Bangkok, enough time to grab a shower, stretch, have a meal, and catch our Thai Airways connecting flight to Melbourne.

The plan mostly worked out. As we settled in the lounge for some Thai food, we decided to check the status of our onward flight. It was…CANCELLED! We were told we could try and find our own way to Melbourne and request reimbursement afterwards. But the only available flights were many, many, thousands of dollars, and we weren’t convinced if and when that full reimbursement would actually happen. The other option was to go to a Thai Airways service desk and see what they could do for us. So we did. As it turned out, so did thousands of others: the cancellation was one of many, apparently flowing (ha ha) indirectly from some flooding in Bangkok a couple of days before.

I’ll spare you the goriest details. In a nutshell, though, we had to stand in line for more than 8 hours (well past midnight) until we reached an agent. And it was not a fun 8 hours. We had to constantly assert our space in line, because situations like this bring out the worst in people. Especially when everybody is a stranger and everybody wants to get out of there. We had no food and little water. We also had no idea what would happen when we reached the front of the line. Would we be leaving for Melbourne in the morning, or stuck in Bangkok for a week until some spaces opened up on a connecting flight vaguely in the direction of Australia?

I’ll never understand why Thai Airways only had 5 agents serving this crush of mostly desperate and angry people. (The police were involved on several occasions to deal with queue-jumpers and potential violence.) Our agent looked exhausted: I suspect he had been working 24 hours or more. He didn’t say a word to us as he grimly stared at his computer screen.

After what seemed like an eternity, he silently handed us some boarding passes for a flight leaving in about eight hours. It was a direct flight to Melbourne, on Thai Airways, and in the same class we had originally booked. Finally, we had a modicum of certainty. We just had to spend a largely sleepless night in the airport, as there wasn’t enough time to find a hotel (if one were even available). Fortunately, they decided to leave the Thai Airways lounge open, and they also continued serving food for most of the night.

This involved a couple of minor inconveniences. We would miss the first night at our destination hotel in Barham, Australia. We would also miss the bus that we had booked from Melbourne to Barham. But there was also a much bigger inconvenience…

The problem was that our luggage had been booked from London directly through to Melbourne (and tagged accordingly). Except that the Bangkok-Melbourne flight, for which our luggage had been tagged, no longer existed. So, when we arrived in Melbourne that night, we had no luggage. It was in limbo, with thousands of other items, somewhere inside Bangkok’s airport. We only had our carry-on backpacks, and a lost luggage claim that we hoped would result in a reunion sooner rather than later (or not at all). At least I was able to find a Melbourne hotel on very short notice near the central bus and train station. I’ll let you know how our lost luggage saga turned out in a future post.

You may be wondering why today’s photos are all from Cardiff…including the cover photo at the very top, which is my meal at Rosa’s Thai (ironically) restaurant in Cardiff. The quick answer: we were too stressed to take pictures in Thailand. And, to be honest, I wasn’t really that interested in immortalizing that experience in photos. I’d rather look at pictures from our far more enjoyable visit to Cardiff!