The odyssey

Sawasdee!

Being the highly organized individuals that we are, we dutifully left for Sydney airport at 5pm, only to arrive there and be told that they weren't checking anyone in yet and that we'd have to wait. But we couldn't wait within the line-up area until they were ready to check us in so we had to loiter around and watch and wait. So we did. After checking in, having dinner, waiting around, etc we finally board the plane and discover that we would be stopping off in Brisbane to drop off and pick up passengers. We arrived in Brisbane a bit after 11pm - so thus far it had taken us six hours to get from our house to Brisbane! Happy travellers we were not!

To make matters worse, we had to get off the plane and hang around Brisbane airport for an hour and a half. Pet managed to get herself a seat after getting some guy to move his bag off it and I got to sit on the floor. Once back on the plane we were finally on our way to Bangkok - thank God!

We had dinner around 1am, followed by some nasty wine, a couple of JDs and some cognac. The movie was some Disney film about some kid. My description of it is about as interesting as it was. Then followed eight hours of sporadic, uncomfortable bouts of "sleep". Fortunately, Pet slept better than I did.

17 and a half hours after leaving home we finally arrived in Bangkok, where we zipped through immigration and jumped onto our plane to Phuket. Hoo-bloody-ray!

Ah, Phuket. Jewel of the Andaman Sea.

Phuket is beautiful. It's so green and lush, the air's so hot and wet and the people are so friendly and welcoming and helpful. They've tried to teach us some basic Thai phrases and they've introduced us to some amazing foods (for more details see Pet's post). We spent yesterday sleeping, swimming, eating and sunbaking and last night when we turned on the TV, in amongst some very amusing Asian pop groups we discovered that one of the stations was playing Star Wars, followed by The Empire Strikes Back. What a way to end our first day in Phuket!

So, we're off on an elephant-back ride through the jungle on Tuesday and heading out to Phi Phi Island by speedboat on Wednesday to go snorkelling.

Until next time...