From Bangkok to Phuket Back to Bangkok in 22 hours! Crazy - Day 2

Today, Danae and I decided to fly to Phuket on a whim. Phuket is an island in Southern Thailand known for it's beautiful beaches. And we flew there and enjoyed them, and flew back to Bankok, all in 22 hours.

 Originally, we were going take a train from Bangkok to Pattaya for the night. Pattaya is a beach town 2 hours outside Bangkok. But we found out that there is no weekend train service. Danae then suggested Phuket. We've both wanted to go here originally, but for some reason, we didn't follow through with it. So when Danae suggested it, I thought it was a great idea and we went for it.

This conversation took place at 4PM and we were in Little India enjoying our vegetarian lunch at an Indian restaurant. An aside, we didn't know it was vegetarian until after we ordered and drank half our sodas. We didn't know what to order, so we asked the waiter what was good. He suggested what is shown in the pictures. I'm not sure what was in the top picture, but in the bottom picture it was some kind of garlic flat bread and the dipping sauce was some kind of mushroom sauce. I was nervous at first, but it ended up being one of the best meals we've had in Thailand thus far.

Mushroom Sauce and Garlic flat bread

Anyways, we had to take metro from Little India halfway across Bangkok to our hotel to pack a night bag. We get to the hotel at 6 and get online to book a flight to Phuket. Unfortunately, Air Asia does not let you book flights online within 4 hours of flight time. Our only option was to physically buy tickets at the airport kiosk. The only flight to Phuket was 9:30PM. We decide to roll the dice.

We planned to take the metro near our hotel and transfer to the airport express train, which would obviously then take us to the airport. The problem, however, is that the airport express train station was about 1/2 mile from the metro station. The directions were not marked, and we did not know which direction to go. So we guessed and started walking. We guessed wrong. At this time, we are 2.5 hours away from flight departure so we started getting nervous. Not only do we not know where the express train station is, but the train only comes every 30 minutes anyways.

We hail a cab. After negotiating the price with a taxi driver that did not speak English, we're off to the airport. Traffic wasn't terrible but it still took 30 minutes. It only cost 10 bucks, not too bad.

We get to the airport, buy our plane tickets, and get through security. We haven't booked a hotel yet, because we wanted to make sure we got our flight first.

We learned by glancing at a travel book in the airport book store that Phuket is an island, not a city. In fact, its a big island with numerous cities.  We had to quickly decide which city to stay in, and then pick a hotel. Not easy when you don't know anything about the place you are going. But we already had the plane tickets, there was no going back.

We bought an hours worth of internet at the airport. It was 9 dollars for one hour! We used it for about 10 minutes before it quit working. I didn't want to pay another $9 dollars for nothing, but we didn't have lodging yet.

We walked to the gate where we were flying from. They had complementary Internet on a computer they had setup by the gate. We looked for a hotel. We then noticed a timer on the computer. It indicated when boarding commenced, and when the computer would shut off. We had 8 mins to find and book a hotel. By the way, when you use a computer in Thailand, the default language is obviously Thai. Such is true even you use an American website such as Travelocity. This cut into our 8 minutes.

My Photo of our Confirmation of our hotel

We miraculously found a hotel.  However, at this point, there was only 2 minutes of usage left. Somehow Danae managed to input our credit card info before time ran out. I had to quickly take a photo of the computer screen to get the confirmation number and hotel address because we could not print anything. I got one kind of fuzzy picture off before the computer shuts off. (the taxi driver ultimately knew where the hotel was located).

We get to Phuket airport, and realize again that the island is pretty big. Further, the airport was 40 miles from out hotel! We had a long taxi ride to our hotel. But we made it there at 10:45PM.

We felt like we were on the amazing race.