Travelling to Thailand Part 1: Arriving in Bangkok

My head ached and my stomach churned on December 26th, 2016, as my friend, Greg, and I awoke at 6 in the morning after a night of Christmas eating and drinking, grabbed our travel backpacks, hopped in a airport taxi and headed towards Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The sun peaked onto the Queen Elizabeth Way. Our driver, Vic, chatted with us, as the car rolled down the QEW towards highway 427. I stared out of the cab’s windows, gazed at the green highway signs leading towards the airport and grinned. My palms sweat. My eyes burned. We were heading to Thailand.Thailand had never been my first choice as a trip, but, when you travel solo most of the time, you jump at the chance to travel with someone else. Greg had proposed the idea back in February of 2016. He told me about a travel company based out of Edmonton called Life Before Work (LBW), showed me that there was more to Thailand than just drinking my face off and covering myself in body paint, and assured me that, although we were paying up front for the group portion of the trip, everything in Thailand (food, booze and clothes) were cheap. I’m not big on group trips, as I like to plan out my own trips and do things spontaneously, but, considering there was probably going to be a fair amount of partying in Thailand, I figured it’d be good to have some people to hang out with right from the start. I committed. A week later, Greg and I met up. I put my deposit down for the group tour, picked up a copy of Lonely Planet’s Thailand book (just in case I decided to break off from the group), and researched Thailand.Over the next ten or so months, we purchased backpacking backpacks, day backpacks, neck pillows, new swimsuits and bug spray. I even bought a new camera (a Sony a6000). We also visited the doctors, got our shots, and picked up our prescriptions for malaria pills (I didn’t take these because the areas we were in had a low risk for malaria and I’d heard the side effects could be brutal, but I’d talk to your doctor and check out the risk level in the areas you’re visiting if you’re planning on going to Thailand). After months and months and months of planning, which only seemed like a month, our cab stopped in front of Pearson International Airport. We high-fived our driver, grabbed our suitcases and walked into the airport.After we went through security, Greg and I grabbed breakfast. My hands sweat. My chest tensed. The thought of a 25+ hour flight started to concern me. I’d never been on a flight that far before, let alone a destination that can’t be flown direct from Toronto. I knew, though, that the nerves were a good thing, and that they meant whatever adventures were coming would be ones I would never forget.We paid for our meals, boarded our first plane, flew across the prairies and Rocky Mountains into Vancouver, and connected with our next flight: a 14 hour flight to Hong Kong. This was the flight I was the most anxious about. 14 hours on a plane sounded like hell. I knew before I got onto the plane I at least had to have a sub from Subway. As our flight was boarding, Greg and I ran towards the Subway line, ordered our food and then ran back towards the gate. We boarded, as they were doing the last boarding call. My Subway sandwich rested on my lab. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, I thought.For the next 14 hours, I drank wine, ate airplane food, watched movies, read a book, walked around and drank some more. The 14 hours, as it turned out, was not that bad. In fact, it was, in some regards, better than the 5 hour flight to Vancouver. This was because, on a 14 hour flight, I had no choice but to forget about the fact that it was a 14 hour flight and just enjoy it. And that’s what I did. I will say that investing in a good neck pillow is a good idea though. I’m terrible at sleeping on planes, but a neck pillow is essential for a flight that long.I should also mention that our flight to Hong Kong was delayed and, since we only had an hour and a half layover between flights, we missed our connecting flight from Hong Kong to Bangkok. When Greg and I walked off the plane, flight attendants shouted at us, stuck Air Canada stickers on our shirts and led us towards the Thai International booth. The attendant at the booth gave us tickets for a flight that was leaving for Bangkok in about an hour. We grabbed our luggage, walked into the waiting area, and grabbed a snack. As we waited to board our plane, I studied the purple and yellow on the Thai International ticket. My heart raced. We were almost in Thailand.The Thai International plane boasted a double decker seating area, pink and purple seats, and, to no surprise, incredible Thai food. The ride took about three hours. As the plane started to descend towards the lights of Bangkok, I realized that I was finally in a place in the world that couldn’t be directly reached from Toronto. We were in a place entirely separated from what we knew.So, after about 30+ hours from leaving Toronto, we landed at around 12am Bangkok time, went through immigration, located a machine that converts Canadian dollars to Thai Baht, and went to the airport exit. A man waited with a Life Before Work sign with our names on it. We met him, waited in the airport for a few minutes, and then hopped in a black Honda Civic, drove away from the airport and headed down the highway towards Bangkok.Billboards in Thai writing popped up beneath the streetlights. Bangkok’s city lights loomed in the distance. I was exhausted, but couldn’t stop staring out the window. As we entered the city streets, people rode bicycle rickshaws, clumps of powerlines tangled, wove and clustered at the tops of electrical poles, and music thumped from every other building. The car eventually stopped in front of an alleyway. A Thai man, in his mid-twenties, approached the car and spoke with our driver. He wore a tank top, board shorts and flip flops. His long hair hung in a ponytail. After a few minutes, the man opened the car doors, we hopped out and he introduced himself as Tank.We walked down the alley way, passed puddles, cats and street vendors, and stepped in an open hostel lobby. The lobby’s faded blue walls shined beneath the dull lights. We approached a desk. Tank handed us a waiver to sign for the hotel. The humidity in Bangkok crawled across our bodies, as we signed the forms.After we signed the forms, Tank handed us a key.“Do you guys want to drop off your bags and go meet the rest of the group? They’re partying out on Koh San Road,” Tank said.Greg and I looked at each other. We frowned.“I don’t know man,” I said, “it took us 30 hours to get here and it’s 1 am."Tank laughed.“Come on man. You’re in Thailand. Just go for at least a beer.”Greg and I sighed.“All right, but we’ll probably go shower and change first.”“No problem. Come down whenever you’re ready.”Greg and I walked up the blue stairs to the second floor. The pitch black hallway loomed. Humidity swept between the walls. We pulled out our phones, turned on our flashlights and found our room. Once we were inside, we spent five minutes figuring out how to turn the lights on (in Thailand, your room keys will typically come with a key card that you need to stick into a slot on the wall to allow the power to work). The lights turned on. Greg and I stared at the two old, twin beds, dirt-covered walls and bars over the windows. Greg stepped into the bathroom.“Dude,” he said, “there’s no shower.”I frowned.“What do you mean there’s no shower?”I stepped into the washroom, studied the tiled walls and floors, and located the toilet and sink. There was no shower.“What the fuck?”We pulled our key out of the slot on the wall. The lights went out. Greg and I walked down the dark, humid hallway, stepped down the blue steps and entered the lobby. Tank grinned.“You guys ready to go party?”“No,” I said, “there’s no shower in the room.”Tank placed his hand on his knee, bent over and laughed.“No shower?” he asked.Greg and I looked at each other.“Yeah, no shower.”He shook his head.“Come with me.”Tank led us back up the stairs, down the hallway and into our room. We stuck the key in the slot on the wall. The lights came on. Tank opened the bathroom door.“The shower head is right here,” Tank said.He pulled a showerhead off the wall.“See how the walls and floors are all tiled? You just shower in here.”Greg and I studied the bathroom. We nodded."Huh," we both said. Tank grinned.“Come down when you’re ready to party,” Tank said, as he left the room.Greg and I laughed.“I guess we’re showering beside the toilet,” he said.We both showered, changed and walked down the stairs and into the lobby. Tank waited there.“Let’s go,” he said.We stepped out of the lobby, traversed down an alley, which was filled with more cats, jewellery sellers and people drinking beers, and emerged onto a road filled with multi-colored lights, music, alcohol, alcohol street vendors and thousands of people all along the road. A sign on one of the buildings read Koh San Road. Greg and I looked at each other. My tiredness disappeared. Tank led us down the road.We reached a group of people dancing, drinking and socializing in front of a Life Before Work street bar (and, by bar, I mean a few ladies selling beer and buckets of alcohol from a tub of ice). I ordered a Chang beer (chang is Thai for elephant). The bottle was the size of about two bottles of beer in Canada. Greg ordered a Chang as well. We clanked bottles, sipped and danced with the other group members.Throughout the night, our group shifted, shimmied and danced up and down Koh San Road. Backpackers, locals and rickshaw drivers lined the neon-lit street. A mix between house music and dubstep echoed down the road. At one point, a police pickup truck and a few officers on foot rolled through the crowd, herded partiers to the side of the road and disappeared into Bangkok's city centre. Once the truck was out of sight, the garbage-covered, damp road lit up again. The streets filled. The music blared.As the night, or rather morning, moved forward, our group started to go to bed. Greg and I, now wired, found ourselves alone on Koh San Road. We staggered down towards the original place we met up with the group, clung to our half empty Changs, and stepped into a bar. The bar’s garage door windows rolled up into the rafters. Blue lights flashed across the dark room. Greg and I wavered through the crowd, ordered a round of Changs, and chatted with a few people.After a few beers and conversations with locals and travellers, we decided we’d go to bed. We checked our phones. The phones read 7:00 am. Greg and I stared at each other. Our drunken eyes gaped.“Holy shit, dude,” Greg said, “we need to be up at noon to meet with the group.”“That’s going to be rough,” I said.We pounded the rest of our beers, walked back out onto the now half-empy (but still partying) Koh San Road, and sprinted down the alleyway towards our hostel, as the sun peaked above Bangkok’s skyline.For more content like this, follow me here.