Well it was quite a day and although we were not excited to be leaving Bali we were really looking forward to getting to Thailand. Grant has been three times and loved it so he's excited to go back and I'm excited to see a new corner of the earth and learn all about why he loves it!
A word of caution to those of you who may want to take off on an adventure- flights change. Often. Honestly you need to keep checking you email up until the day of to see if your flight has been cancelled or if there has been time changes made. Looking back on it and we had been on phones with airlines a week before we left- and it's probably happened four additional times. Flying from Bali to Bangkok was no different.
We had booked tickets to fly out at like 1 AM (I know more over night traveling. Ugh.) We were going to land in Bangkok at like 4:30AM and catch another flight to Chang Mai at like 6AM.
We realize after doing this several times it's not the best plan (traveling over night.) There are a few reasons. First off, I can't sleep on the plane, Grant kind of can. Either way we land and are exhausted and I'm VERY sensitive due to lack of sleep and inevitably start crying in a store because I can't read the labels and I don't know what kind of chips they are, but I am NOT going to get the ones that look like they are lobster flavored! Grant tries his best to console me and makes feeble attempts to help all while yawning and rubbing his eyes. We eventually leave and try again after a long nap and some food.
The other thing to consider is most places have a 3PM check in. Which means if you get to your destination and its raining and is 12PM. You will end up soaking wet and waiting to get into your place. On the other hand traveling over night is considerably cheaper and in theory makes sense. In a perfect world you sleep on the plane then find your hotel, drop off your luggage and go get some food and explore the neighborhood a bit.
So that was our original plan, however, the airport canceled our first flight. So we called, and talked, and they put us on an earlier flight-6pm. That would make our 1.5 hour layover into an 7.5 hour layover. They didn't have an earlier flight to Chang Mai. So we started doing some research, changed up our plans, cancelled our flight to Chang Mai and found a hotel in Bangkok for two nights.
The coolest part about this was that was we were not flying over night! We were expected to land in Bangkok at 10 PM!
So we booked a taxi to take us to the airport at 2PM. We arrived at the airport at 4PM. We realized our flight at actually at 6:50PM- okay no worries it gives us plenty of time. Get through security and find our gate and then go get a snack- Nachos. The nachos had beans in them which I thought might be a strange choice for airport food- airport restaurants probably shouldn't have beans as an option in my opinion- but they were good. We went back to the gate to find out our flight has been delayed until 7:30. No biggie. We don't end up boarding until 8. We don't actually take off until like 8:45.
We flew with AirAsia and apparently this is a no frills airline (Think Spirit or Frontier. ) They don't even offer you water. We thought that was insane. Had I known I would have bought some water at the airport. You could pay for water, but it was cash only and we didn't have enough. I was so upset. The woman sitting next to us was SO kind and gave us a bottle of water since she had and extra one. We were extremely grateful and returned the favor when we ran into her at the airport 7-11 after we got off the plane.
We landed, I think it was around 11:30 or midnight. We had to take a bus from the plane to the gate, went through customs, went to the 7-11, went to the ATM and found a taxi. On the map it looked like our hotel was really close to the airport- Grant suggested we walk, but I was not feeling it, and thank god I shot that idea down because it ended up be a 40 minute cab ride. We later learned it takes 40 minutes to get anywhere in Bangkok. So we arrived at our hotel at 2AM. It wasn't overnight exactly, but still 12 hours of traveling and we were still exhausted, thankfully getting into our room was super easy and it was clean and looked just like the pictures. There were no crying spells or difficult decisions to make and we were safe and sound tucked up in bed while it was still dark out. More on our adventures in Bangkok to come!
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