A Breakthrough
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2008
1
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Bangkok,
Thailand
Saturday, November 29, 2008
It's been widely publicised that the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the TAT, is offering free hotels to stranded tourists. We ring them. They give us two other numbers to ring. We try the first number; nobody speaks English. We try the second number; we get given a third number. We try the third number; it's the Thai Telecom operator. We phone the TAT again. We get another number. We try this number; there are no rooms available.
Again I waste time trying to get through to Etihad. They literally could not be less use. We've spent nearly twenty quid on Skype phone calls in the last two days. Skype is cheap. That's a lot of phone calls. Thank God for Skype; it'd be more like 100 quid without it.
I decide to go to the Etihad office. I've practiced a lot of reasons for which myself and Catherine should be put on a flight ASAP. (I've got patients coming to see me from Wednesday, I'm Best Man at a wedding on friday (the entire reason we booked the flights for the date we were supposed to fly), Catherine's not well). I'll be patient and calm. I'll try not to hurt or kill anybody and I'll try not to get arrested.
Traffic is busy, being Bangkok. I need to clear my mind as I am a very angry man at this stage, so I walk the four miles or so there through the midday heat of Bangkok. I finally got to the point that Google Maps had indicated the office to be in. No sign. I ask in a local travel agent; the staff all start talking amongst themselves in Thai, and then the man I was speaking to tells me that the office is far away and I need to get a taxi. They start talking amongst themselves again.
I reached across the desk and picked up two pencils. I inserted one into each of my nostrils. I cocked my neck back and was about to slam my face down onto the desk, instantly ending my frustration and my life at once, when he spoke to me again to tell me that he had been mistaken. He walked onto the street with me and indicated where I should walk to.
Forty five minutes later, having walked the same route three times, I realised for certain that he was wrong. Again I asked. Most people had no idea, but gave a standard "you need a taxi" answer. Problem is, unless you speak Thai or know of a landmark near to your destination, the Bangkok cabbies don't have a clue either. Eventually I found someone confident that they knew where I wanted to go; I jumped on the Skytrain (not as glamorous as it sounds, like the underground on stilts) and twenty minutes later I located the holy grail.
The office, on the eleventh floor, was full. I took a numbered ticket and joined the queue. I refused to be dissuaded by the lady telling me I should come back tomorrow, as I would be waiting for up to three hours. I told her it had taken me three hours to find the office, and I was happy to wait.
Less than two hours later I got to sit at a desk with a lady from Etihad. I was pretty nervous; I don't like making people uncomfortable and I hate seeing self-important people talking about "their rights". I realise that Etihad have very limited options. But I do need to get home. What's the best way to play it?
I gave the lady our flight details and passports.
"There's only two of you?" she asked. Odd question, I thought. She stood up and left her desk. She returned five or six minutes later.
"I will check you in now, there is a flight tonight but it is a secret" she said, holding her finger to her mouth in a "ssshhhh...." gesture. I wasn't sure if she was joking, if she had suddenly become demented, or if maybe I was still in the queue and had dropped off to sleep.
What to do? We NEED to get home. But we don't know about Annie; she's with Cathay Pacific. We don't want to leave her here on her own. I texted her, she said to get the flights, so I did. We need to be at the Radisson hotel to check in, tomorrow at 6pm.
I left the office elated. I found it difficult to believe what had just happened. The next-door tower block had a Cathay Pacific sign outside it. I phoned Annie and asked her to come and meet me. This was going to take a long time; it was now rush hour.
Annie left the hotel to come and meet me immediately. Two and a half hours later she arrived. We pleaded her cause over and over, but the lady had little to offer. She understood Annie's plight, and went as far as to give Annie her personal email address and mobile number, she was very helpful indeed. Finally we left with tickets in two days for Annie departing from Phuket, a fourteen hour drive south of Bangkok.
We were just leaving Cathay Pacific when Etihad phoned me.
"The flight is now tonight, you need to be at the Radisson at 10pm". It was now 7.45.
We raced back to the hotel (the traffic was lighter now; we'd been at Cathay for about an hour and a half) and hurriedly packed. We made it to the Radisson at 9.30pm. We left Annie there, with the pink laptop (that's why there's a few days of gap prior to this entry; I'd written it, but it's on the laptop and I'm not going to be able to upload it til I get it back.)
It was an odd set up. We actually checked in to the flight at the hotel, gave them our luggage, and boarded buses. I joked with a scouser in front of me that he was going to be cold when we arrived in Manchester, as he was in shorts and a T-shirt. He too had been phoned and had to go immediately to the airport, with no time to even change his clothes.
"I'm not bothered mate" he told me, "nobody knows I've got a flight home, I'm going to see my mate in London for five days, work don't know."
Three hours later we arrived at the small military airport. It was chaos. There was a "queue" (it wasn't ordered; just a crowd really) of about 300-400 people. That was just to get in to the terminal. It was 1am.
It was pretty mad in there. There were policeman standing on podiums in the middle of the crowd yelling through megaphones. We were going to be there for hours. And we were. At about 8am the flight took off. We'd been on our feet all night. But we were going home.
Twenty minutes before we arrived in Abu Dhabi to change planes they announced that none of our luggage had been loaded on to the plane. Good luck to the scouser, getting to London in his shorts and T-shirt. But nobody was annoyed; we were all so glad to be going home.
