BANGKOK

Once again Air Asia was spot on time – they really seem to have their act together. At Bangkok we arrived at Don Mueang Airport and needed to get to Suvarnabhumi airport for the BA flight home. Thoughtfully, there is a free shuttle bus between the two. Can you imagine Heathrow and Gatwick organising anything so public-spirited ?

So we arrived at the latter mid afternoon with our flight to LHR not leaving until after midnight. The solution was a hotel 5 minutes from the airport which offered a free shuttle each way and had a nice pool. We enjoyed a relaxing few hours there, had dinner around the corner and then headed back to the airport late evening. We told the hotel we were standing by for our flight and that if we didn’t get away we would be back – so they didn’t resell our room. Just as well because that’s exactly what happened. But it wasn’t all bad because as we arrived back a bit of channel flicking found a live broadcast of MUFC v Reading.

Next day we paid for another night so that we could again stay until late evening. The room was quite small but quite new and fitted out with everything you need.  The pool gave us somewhere to be all day – we didn’t really want to go back into the city – once you’ve started for home you just only want to get on with it.

So late evening we repeated our procedure of the night before. The flight was again pretty much full, but they offered us one jump seat, which we declined because we didn’t want to split up. After a bit they came back and said they now had two jump seats which we reluctantly accepted – over 12 hours without a proper seat is not an attractive proposition but we could see that the situation wasn’t likely to improve over the next few days so we thought we’d just bite the bullet. In the event, when we got to the gate they swapped our two jump seat boarding cards for two numbered seats - OK, not together, but by that time it was a real bonus. We had no idea how that had happened.

So we left Bangkok where it had been about 95F, after Yangon at about 103F, and arrived at LHR at 6am on a Monday where it was -1F and there was frost everywhere. Welcome home.