Bangkok and Phuket and Bangkok, Thailand, Country 19, Stops 48, 49, 50

Nov. 17

After we break out of the Sri Lankan hotel, we head to the airport and get on our flight to Bangkok. We are a bit nervous about entering Thailand because you have to have all these forms--passenger locator forms and proof of hotel and proof of flights exiting the country. But it ends up being ok. With the Test and Go program in Thailand, you no longer need to quarantine for a week. Now, to enter you are required to have a hotel booked ahead of time and transportation arranged that will take you straight from the airport to the hotel, where you will remain for the next 24 hours. We meet our drivers (we have to travel in two separate cars) and head to the Banyan Tree and we are taken into the parking garage the back way to enter the hotel. The cars pull up and someone whisks our luggage away while we are taken to have covid tests. Then we are escorted to our rooms on a special quarantine floor. We get checked in from inside the rooms (love this) and our bags are delivered to us. We are told to call reception if we need anything, as we are not allowed to leave the rooms until our tests come back negative. However, we are given a lovely little welcome drink.

It's 2 pm and we are in gorgeous hotel rooms where we *have* to order room service and can't go anywhere or do anything. Oh, please don't throw me in that briar patch. ;) It's a luxury, actually. We love that not only do we not have any place we have to be but we CAN'T go any place so we should just enjoy doing nothing. And that's at 2 pm. We order room service and hang out and feel like lazy cats basking in the sun.

Then at 7 pm the novelty has worn off and I feel like we have been in the room days and days and days. I do NOT know how a lot of people in many countries had mandatory quarantine for long periods of time. I remember seeing people in Italy living in tiny apartments and they couldn't leave for weeks at a time. We were pretty lucky living in California that we could be outside all year and were able to get exercise by riding our bikes at the beach.

Nov. 18

We are free!!!! Our tests have come back negative and we are not only free to leave our rooms, but we actually MUST leave our rooms. We move to new rooms on a non covid floor. We head to the hotel breakfast which is very good. Then we check out the gym and pool and I'm happy to say that the pool is AMAZING and I enjoy doing laps quite a bit.

***Dmitri: Thailand is a good deal at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Everything is dirt cheap and the people clearly need the tourist dollars. We're spoiled for choice, paying less than makes sense, and tipping as much as we can without being offensive. Covid continues to suck, but have silver linings.***

Dmitri and I came to Thailand 20 years ago and back then Khao San Road was a pretty lively place. We take Mia and hope for the best. But post-covid Khao San is just sad and we don't stay long. There are hardly any people there and only a fraction of the stores and clubs and restaurants open. We have some street food which is cheap and delicious and we wish we had bigger appetites so we could order more food and run the bill up. We go into a few shops to get some souvenirs.

That's not coffee! That's beer. Places are not allowed to serve alcohol so they covertly poured the bottle into the "coffee" cup.

Mia is very happy with all the flavor in Thailand!!

***Mia: In ordinary times, I suspect the liveliness of Khao San Road would've been the highlight of my night, but since it was sad and empty, the best part of the evening was the giant bluetooth speaker in the tuktuk that our driver let me connect to. For 15 minutes we whipped around Bangkok while jamming out to Phil Collins and KC & The Sunshine Band.***

We walk around a bit and then head to Sukhomvit Soi 11but it's depressing as well. There are a few more people out and about but it's mainly older white men with young Thai girls. We head back to our hotel and head to the 59th floor to have drinks and dessert on the rooftop bar. It's aptly named Vertigo.

Nov. 19

Happy Loi Krathong! Loi Krathong is held annually at the time of the fall full moon, usually in November. It coincides with the Lantern Festival where lanterns are lit and released and fill the sky. We had planned to be in Chiang Mai for both this year, but covid. So no Chiang Mai and no lanterns, but at least we get to be in Thailand for Loi Krathong. Loi Krathong literally translates "to float a basket" and locals send their elaborately decorated baskets into rivers and lakes. This is to symbolize sending their bad luck away and having a new beginning. We head to a park about 15 or so minutes from the hotel called Lumphini Park, where a lot of locals gather.

We follow the crowd and watch as they release their krathongs. It's very festive and fun and we are glad to be a part of it. While we are bummed to miss the lanterns in the sky, we love the energy of the holiday. When we return to the hotel we set krathongs afloat in the hotel koi pond and make our wishes for new beginnings.

Nov. 20

Dmitri has some work to do so the kids and I head off to see the Reclining Buddha at Wat Po. Also, Dmitri has seen it a few times. The kids and I catch a cab and when I go to pay the driver, Jack is confused for a minute. He thinks I got the amount wrong since it cost so little to travel across town to Wat Po. No, I assure him. It's the right amount. It's just very cheap in Thailand. We wander around and the kids are appropriately wowed at the size of the Buddha.

Jack, naturally, finds a cat.

***Jack: I knew the giant reclining Buddha was going to be giant but the sheer scale of him was massive.***

When we return to the hotel, Dmitri and I walk to a nearby mall and have lunch while the kids order room service. All through Thailand Jack enjoys ordering room service. It will be tough to break him of this habit when we go to more expensive locations.

At night, we head out on a bike tour around Bangkok to see the temples lit up and also to see some local areas. We weave in and out of small alleys and see where locals eat and live and work. We eat at this amazing restaurant and we are the only tourists there.

Our guide is VERY happy that we are visiting Thailand. He tells us it's the first tour he has done in a very long time. He thanks us for coming to visit his country. This is something we have heard a few times since we arrived in Bangkok--from the people in the hotel and the waiter at breakfast and now the tour guide. The Thai people are already very warm and welcoming and now even more so. They are genuinely pleased to have tourists back.

***Jack: During our bike tour we got to eat in a cheap restaurant with other locals before continuing the tour.***

***Dmitri: We sweated it out for a good 4 hours all over Bangkok going at a strong clip. Our guide was a young Thai guy and his boss, an amiable older Dutch gentleman. The Dutch don't mess around with bikes. They're hard core. So when Cindy says we explored, wow did we. Zipping through alleys, byways and waterfronts. It was exhausting, and one of the better bike tours we've had.***

Nov. 21

All too soon, it's time to leave Bangkok. Once we have passed our quarantine covid tests, we are free to move around Thailand. We head to the airport and fly to Phuket. Since it's a domestic flight, the airport is easy peasy. No covid tests required. We just get on the plane and go. When we arrive in Phuket, we head for Bang Tao beach and the SAii Laguna. Ah yes. We think we will be very VERY happy here for the next 9 days. We have lunch at the hotel then walk around and check out the area. There is a little market nearby and up the beach we have lots of places offering Thai massages for 300 baht ($10). We will have to investigate those further. We have dinner at the beach bar at our hotel and would fall asleep listening to the sound of waves crashing but for the fact that hotels in this part of the world don't seem to have screen doors and we need to keep mosquitos out.

Nov. 22

We commence what will mainly turn into a rinse and repeat situation here in Phuket. We eat breakfast, some of us go to the gym, I do laps in the pool, we take a dip in the ocean, we get cheap massages, we work on travel plans.

Doing my laps in style! For the most part, I have the pool to myself!

In between, we eat and relax and then we wake to do it all over again. And again. The sunsets are gorgeous, the food is cheap, the people are friendly and the ocean is warm. I discover pineapple fried rice and proceed to get it 5 or 6 more times during the course of our stay.

Rooster making the rounds begging for food!

Nov. 23

One of the down sides to being on the go and flexible due to covid is that we need to spend a great deal of time on the trip planning for the trip. We spent a GREAT DEAL of time pre March 2020 coming up with an itinerary and booking a route and hotels and flights and such. Then when we pushed our trip off by a year, we did it all again. And so we have TWICE canceled a lot of what we painstakingly put together to avoid having to be staring at a computer screen looking at flight schedules and pricing out hotels and airbnbs. And yet, here we are.

So we have more travel planning to do. We scored a cruise from Dubai to Cape Town at a great price, but we have to figure out how to make our way home after that. We are going to be in Los Angeles in earlyish January to get our booster shots, see family and friends, and then head from there to South America. The cruise ends December 21 and we think we might head home via Europe, stopping in Paris for Christmas and London for New Year's.

That decided, we head off to the pool and waterslide.

Nov. 24

Ach! We wake to find out that NCL has changed our Dubai to Cape Town cruise. They have taken out stops to the Seychelles, Madagascar and Reunion and added in 3 days in Durban, South Africa, as well a few more days at sea. No good for us! So we pretty much spend the day looking at alternatives. The kids were SO excited for a cruise. We find one that goes from Dec. 23-Jan. 3 leaving from Miami. Score! This means we can swing by Boca and visit my dad and Patsy, the kids still get the cruise and social interaction they have been dying for, and we still are set to arrive in LA in early January. We can get our booster shots before heading to South America. Now we just need to fill time between around Dec. 4 to 19th. Hmmmm. What to do, what to do. We spend a great deal of the day looking at flights and routes and cruises. Dmitri finds a route where we can still go through Paris and visit the Christmas markets, then go to Miami via Morocco. Hmmm, very intriguing. Until I read this blog about how Morocco is, well.....let me just put it this way. It gave us some serious Egypt PTSD. So now back to the drawing board yet AGAIN. Btw, this is the article and any other time we would be game to give it a try. I still want to go to Morocco some day! However, after Egypt, we are a little gun shy.

Our new game plan--Phuket and maybe Bangkok until around Dec. 4, then Edinburgh, Paris, Miami/Boca, cruise, LA. Now we need to book it all! And cancel the flights and airbnb we had booked in Dubai.

Nov. 25

Happy American Thanksgiving. We wake to a drizzly morning here in Phuket. We also wake to more travel planning. Sigh. At least we have a turkey dinner to look forward to......oh, wait. Oh well, we will make pina coladas and Thai food work for us. I've been having pineapple fried rice at a little beach restaurant every day for the past 3 days. While we miss home and family and friends, we have a lot to be thankful for this year.

Yummy Thanksgiving dinner!

I am SO happy to be eating pineapple rice.

***Jack: For the first time in my life, I went jet skiing off the beach, a truly amazing experience.***

Nov. 26

We have a CRAZY day of productivity and booking. London is out--too expensive. We found and booked a cruise out of Miami, we booked flights from Bangkok to Europe, we booked trains, we booked hotels. It was a frenzy of activity and the kids were wise to steer clear of us and let us hash it all out. We have a plan! After Thailand, we are headed to Europe for impossible Christmas cuteness in Edinburgh, Bruges, and Paris. NCL actually did us a favor by rerouting their cruise because many countries are closing their borders to travelers from South Africa because of the omicron variant! So we would have had to reroute anyway. We just got a head start and were able to get a few post Thanksgiving deals.

In the evening, Dmitri and Jack and I take a cab down to Patong Beach to walk around. While clearly not up to usual party time standards, Bangla road is more hopping than any place we have seen so far. We walk around a bit, shop for souvenirs, have a bite to eat and watch Jack have some target practice with a BB gun. Meanwhile, Mia is also at Patong Beach, but we manage to miss her. On purpose. Mia is out with an Irish guy her age who is taking a year off to train in Muay Thai. She has her movie moment when she rides on the back on his moped and they walk on the beach in the rain and she eats a fried scorpion on a stick.

Nov. 27

Today all four of us head out to explore some sea caves as a part of a tour. We are picked up at the hotel and taken to a boat across the island. While we cruise toward the sea caves, they put out a delicious spread of food. One of the comments that frequently comes up on reviews about this tour is how good the food is. The commenters are 100% correct this time. The food is outstanding. MUCH better than general tour group on a boat fare. Jack is not a fan of the soup, which prompts one of the crew to announce loudly, "That boy don't like soup." It's one of those moments where I think you have to be there because we find this uproariously funny and laugh about it long after the fact. We arrive and all get on sea canoes with guides, who take us through caves that in some places are so tight, we have to lie flat on our backs. We see amazing lagoons. It is so gorgeous. We go swimming in the jade green water and then get back on the boat and make krathongs with our guides. Later, after dark and an amazing dinner, they take us back into another sea cave and we light them and release them. It's magical. Then we blow out the candles on the krathongs and when the cave is good and dark, we splash our hands in the water and see bioluminescence. It's incredible. As we exit into the dark night on the water, lightning storms cascade around the limestone cliffs around us as we kayak back to the boat.

On the boat we meet a lot of nice people. We meet an English guy who was born in France and now lives in Berlin and he's just arrived in Phuket for a 3 week vacation. We also meet an American woman who is an attorney for the US government stationed here for 3 years. It was supposed to be her dream posting and it just hasn't turned out that way with covid disrupting things. We also meet a German man who works for 6 months to earn enough money to travel for 6 months. He travels with a little doll creature (I think that is from some anime or video game or something) and takes photos of it lots of places. He used to travel with an angel figure but somewhere a monkey stole it while he was taking a photo of it! We show him the Sock Monkey website and he is delighted and exclaims, "Ah yas I know Zis monkey." His website is in German, but is pretty spectacular and we aspire to travel like he does! His insta is in English and has some AMAZING photos--andreas.modos--and we are really enjoying some of the people we meet on our journey.

At this point we realize that it's been awhile since we have seen Sock Monkey! We didn't really miss him in Bangkok, as the original SM visited there 20 years ago. Where could he be??? We look and look again in all the bags. No dice. Ugh, it's *very* possible that he was in the bag that we left on the plane from Sri Lanka to Bangkok. Sri Lankan Air has located the bag and when we return to Bangkok in a few days we will head to the airport to pick it up.

Nov. 28

Happy birthday to Holly!

Having done a great deal of travel planning the past few days, we reward ourselves with a chill day at the hotel today. Mia is feeling a bit under the weather. I catch up on blogs and swim some laps. Dmitri hits the gym and plays some poker while chatting with people back home--Hi, Dave and Steph and Ray!

I have my pineapple rice in a pineapple again. We swim in the ocean again. We see another beautiful sunset. Again. Life is good on Bang Tao Beach. The time has flown by! I can't believe we have tomorrow and then we fly back to Bangkok.

Nov. 29

Today we have teeth cleaning and hair cuts! It's our last full day at the SAii Laguna hotel. Although we hate to leave the beach, we have a few more days in Thailand, as we head from here to Bangkok.

Nov. 30

We end up with a few bonus days in Bangkok after the change in our travel plans, as we are flying from BKK to Edinburgh instead of Phuket to Dubai. It's all good. We like Bangkok. We stay in a different place, near Ekamai BTS stop. I manage to pull a muscle in my back, which is simply ridiculous and I hobble around Bangkok for a few days. The kids and I walk to the local mall for food and to check things out. With no set agenda, we are good to chill and eat more Thai food and live cheaply.

Dec. 1

Mia and I head BACK to the airport to try to find our lost bag. Surprisingly, they do have the bag we left on the flight but Sock Monkey is NOT in it! So we don't know where he is. He must have fallen out somewhere. After much gnashing of teeth (and looking to see if a Sock Monkey could be bought in Bangkok or Edinburgh), we order a new one shipped to FL and decide we will pick him up when we pass through Boca. After all, the old sock monkey has been to Belgium and France so it will have to be ok.

Dec. 2

We head to a big mall to check out the decorations and also to see if we can find long underwear for our stops in Europe. With the exception of Antarctica, our plan is to be traveling in places with warm weather. We have layers but nothing for any place really cold. We walk around the mall and are unsuccessful in finding cold weather gear, but it's quite festive and we find a place that sells Mexican food in a little Christmas market stall area. Nothing says Christmas like Mexican food in Thailand.

Dec. 3

I just filled out PLFs (passenger locator forms) for the umpteenth time for when we fly tomorrow to Edinburgh. AND ordered the at home swab tests to be delivered to the hotel. And now I’m looking into tests for when we arrive in Miami. Every single country has rules and regulations. For example, when we get to Paris we have to go to a pharmacy—only a selected one though—with our vaccination card and for 36 euros they will give us a code for a French Health Pass to be used at restaurants and museums and such. Sigh.

Mia was interested in visiting the Jim Thompson house when we were in Bangkok the last time but it hadn't yet opened back up again. Now it's open and off we go. We take the BTS and feel very competent and worldly. And we curse the lack of cheap and easy public transit in much of the US.

On the way back, we stop at the Gateway mall at Ekamai stop and wander around and come across a store with all of these t shirts with words in English that do not make any sense. They are too, too funny and as we walk around the mall we laugh and laugh and then decide that something that brings us so much joy really needs to be bought. So we each get a shirt at the very reasonable price of $6 each.

And that's a wrap on Thailand for now. We hope to come back in the spring and go to Krabi and possibly Chiang Mai depending on what is happening with restrictions and variants and whatnot.

Dec. 4 fly BKK-Helsinki-Edinburgh

Today will be one of the longer travel days for us. We are up for an early flight from Bangkok to Edinburgh, with a layover in Helsinki. And off we go.....