Travelling troubles...

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Thursday 15 July

I am now sitting in the departure lounge at Phuket airport, determined to finish my travel blog before arriving back home in Sydney! Not so the boys with their journals - they are both still in London. Ryan is sitting next to me, writing in his, but as he puts so much detail into each entry, I don’t expect him to finish before he is once again swamped by school work. I left off at Heathrow, about to board the flight to Bangkok, which was another jam-packed flight and our ‘empty’ middle seat was unfortunately occupied. This time Dean, who was seating between Ryan and I, decided to sleep lying down, with his head on my lap and his feet digging into Ryan’s back, with a lot of accompanying crying and arguing, as he was adamant that he was going to sleep with his legs straight. Eventually with the help of a dose of Phenergan he fell asleep, woke a few hours later and cried some more, then slept again, right through breakfast. Meanwhile my right thigh was completely numb and I couldn’t get into a comfortable-enough position to doze off for more than a few minutes.

On disembarking eleven hours later in Bangkok, we spotted a notice announcing that passengers Klugman had to collect their baggage in Bangkok, so off we went to the luggage carousel. Four bags came through but not the fifth, which happened to be one of the two big suitcases. The question was, which one was missing? The one packed with everything we needed for Club Med (my summer dresses, bathing costumes, all summer clothes other than those we had taken to Paris) or the other one with the winter stuff, books we’d read, souvenirs, and everything we didn’t need in Phuket? We reported the missing bag to the Qantas baggage services desk and were told that it looked like the bag hadn’t left London, and we would probably receive it in the next day or two. We found our way, slightly less loaded, to the domestic check-in and finally we were on our way to Phuket. We had been worried that we would be short on time for this connection, with just under two hours from our international arrival to our domestic departure, but even with the delay caused by the lost luggage, we were fine (rushing through Heathrow on our way to Tel Aviv, even with our luggage checked straight through, was tighter and more stressful).

We arrived at Phuket airport and as we left the terminal, we were assailed by taxi drivers, bus drivers, hotel touts and tour operators all vying for our business. All we wanted was the Club Med shuttle bus, which was nowhere in sight, but arrived a few minutes later, much to our relief. We were surprised to find out that the trip to the resort was a fifty to sixty minute journey! It was by now evening and dark, quite a change from the 10 pm sunsets in London and Paris. An hour later we arrived at Club Med, where we were checked in and shown to our rooms, which were two large ajoining rooms, one with the largest king size bed we had ever seen, and other with three single beds, and each with an en-suite bathroom and separate toilet. We dumped our bags and headed straight for the dining room as it was coming to the end of dinner time. We were greeted with a huge buffet with an incredible selection of different cuisines. More of that later...

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