Bumpy Bangkok

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Ok, Im in the UK now, but ill start the adventure off from when I left auckland.

Left auckland at 3pmish on the 28th of March. We were stoked to find out that our plane had individual TV monitors, and even games where you could play against other passengers. The multitue of movies helped heaps in passing the 12 hours of flying to bangkok. Chicken little rocks by the way...go see it.

Anyway, the flight was pretty bumpy. I would say that for at least 70% of the flight, there was turbulance of some sort.
I had the window seat for the last half of the flight, as Trav had it for the first half. When we were about 40 minutes away from bangkok, we came across a massive thunder storm. We didnt fly threw it, but I could clearly see it from my window... it was probaly 50 or so km to the west of us.
It was pretty spectaular, but it was an omen for things to come.

As we approached bangkok, I guess we had to stack to wait in line to appraoch the runway, as we circled around for a few minutes... all the time watching this thunder storm continue on it's flashy way. We finally started out final approach for the runway, and with about 5km to go, it got bumpy. Very, very bumpy.
I was recording the whole event with my video cam (yea yea naughty electronics operating during landing), and as we came to touch down, the pilot had to abort the landing as we got to about 20 feet above the ground, as the plane was going all over the show (got it on tape!). That got the passengers real nervous.
So we climber back to sort of crusing altitiue, and the pilot announced he aborted due to cross winds (duh)... and that they were going to try again. But then we just kept on flying around bangkok, and about 40 minutes (!!!!) later, the pilot announced that bangkok airport was closed due to the crosswinds, and we would be going to another near by airport. This sucked as we had a transfer picking us up from bangkok to take us to the hotel. It was about 1am local time by now.
So we flew about a bit more, and then started to descend for a second time, but I noticed that we were heading back to bangkok, not this other airport (on the flight path display screen they had). The flight was still real rough, and a chick behind us decided to empty her stomach, which didnt help the cause.
So we approached bangkok for a 2nd time, and landed, although just as sketchy as the first time around. I swear we were skidding sideways for a second there. The whole plane erupted into applause once we had reduced our speed to something less than break neck.

To top the whole adventure off.... as we slowed to a taxi'ing speed at the end of the runway, we rolled passed 6 fire engines, with lights on, waiting by the runway..."just in case".

Got off the plane, kissed the ground, went through customs (customs? haha... more like 1 guy at a desk not wanting to work and waving everyone through) and made our way to New road guest house...where we got our rooms and went to sleep.

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