Thursday September 1st, 2011

It's now been about two months that I've been home in Sydney and separated from Daniel *moop* He has now moved to China for work in a town called TEDA, Tianjin, which is about 40 minutes from Beijing by train. Although it's been hard being apart, it's also given me the opportunity to catch up with everyone-family, friends, my pets and doing home renovations.

I'll be going over to TEDA after our R&R break. For this round of R&R, we've decided to go to The Land of Smiles- Thailand. I've heard such wonderful and beautiful things about this place. Many of Daniel's work colleagues have gone time and time again and Darren, one of his best mates has a house over in Koh Chang island, which he has so kindly offered for us to stay in. We are planning to stay in Pattaya for a few days, then catch the ferry to Koh Chang. It'll be good to just relax the last few days and laze by the beach...

Seeing as Daniel and I are in different countries at the moment, we set our flights so that we could meet up in Hong Kong and then get our connecting flight to Bangkok together. It feels like we are going on a week long date lol.

My flight left at 10am. Mum and my sister did the usual breakfast at Sydney International Airport. It's the thing we do now. It's a nice little ritual we do every time I fly out. It gives me abit of extra family time, which I miss so much when I travel.

The flight itself was smooth. An empty flight means an empty seat next to me, which means I get to be a hell of a lot more comfortable!!!
I safely arrived in Hong Kong around 5.45pm and as I steps off the plane and turned the corner, there was my gorgeous Daniel waiting for me. I was so excited to see him. His flight arrived just moments before mine, so the timing couldn't have been more perfect.

We had 3 hours to spare, so we settled at Cathay Pacific's Cabin Lounge to snack, drink and freshen up. We soon noticed that out flight started to board, so we made our way to our gate number. It was a busy flight; full of tour groups. I was pretty tired by this stage, so after reading a few pages of my book 'Tokyo Hostess' by Clare Campbell, which by the way, I totally recommend, my eyes felt heavy and I started doozing off in the land of ZzZzZ's....

Daniel had other ideas. He kept waking me up by tapping my nose like I was some sort of Chinchilla pet.

'Local time is 10.36pm. Welcome to Bangkok' announced the Pilot. As we all started to get up to grab our bags, one of the passengers from an asian tour group that was sitting in front of us, started looking abit woozy and decided to vomit. Just a bit. She disappeared into the bathroom after she dirtied the floor and then came out again. As she stood there, she fainted and fell back into her seat. poor thing. Her friends started waving her some fresh air with their hands as the air hostess come to her aid. I'm not too sure what happened after that as we move to the other aisle and left the plane.

I could feel the warm, night breeze as soon as we stepped off the plane. It was such a nice change after spending another winter in Sydney. I was ready for some Vitamin D.

Daniel had arranged for a limousine car (basically it's a nice, spacious, private car) to pick us up from the airport and to take us directly to the Amari Orchid Hotel in Pattaya. The trip would take about 1 hour, but we figured we'd just sleep the whole way there. I love to sleep at any given opportunity, but I was in a foreign country, it was late in the night and we worth both tired and vulnerable- I was going to try and stay awake the whole way there. You see, as much as I love to travel and explore new places, I assume the worse case scenarios. For instance with this situation-
1) we might be taken somewhere else and be robbed
2) we might be robbed.
3) we might be robbed.

Well that didn't last long.. we both fell asleep within minutes into the trip and I only woke up because of the thud I felt due to the super fast speeding our driver was doing lol. All I could see were highways and lighting. It was wet season so storms were abundant. All I could do was hope we'd get to the Amari. And sure enough, an hour later, we arrived safely at our hotel.

The Amari was recommended to us by a friend and was position at the beginning of the main Street in Pattaya. It was now close to midnight and all we wanted was a bed. We went to check in but there was some misunderstanding with our booking. Although we had upgraded, they had no rooms available, so after abit of talking and explaining, they gave us their nicest room in the non upgraded room, but with the upgraded room benefits. It was a win/win.

The room was perfect. It had an awesome view of the ocean and the strip. It had a bath tub behind the bed and balcony, fresh fruit and a massive bed. This was bliss. Before we headed to bed, we ordered in room service and celebrated with some champagne
x

Day 1- It's R&R time-destination- The land of smiles remains copyright of the author Two Otters, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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