Leaning In

A day of travel was what we had ahead of us, we can manage that right? It started with a 5.30am wake up call in order to grab a quick breakfast before going to get the train from Kanchanaburi Station to Thon Buri, Bangkok. Our first hurdle was pretty early on when, for the first time since arriving in Thailand, we weren’t able to get a Grab taxi to the station. That’s okay, Ryan went to ask at the front desk and was told that the train stops at the River Kwai Bridge station and we’d be able to get tickets there. This was just a couple of minutes walk from our hotel, so that was easy! We arrived at the platform to find that the ticket office was permanently closed, however a sign assured us that we would be able to get tickets on the train. Phew! 

The train arrived early, which, as far as we can tell, is practically unheard of in Thailand. Ryan was very excited at the prospect of taking our first Thai train and thoroughly enjoyed getting various video footage during the journey while I slept as best I could. I don’t know what was louder, the train or the people on it! 

We arrived in Thon Buri earlier than expected, and headed to our next port of call, the DJI service centre to pick up Ryan’s drone which hadn’t worked properly since we arrived. We arrived, the drone was working perfectly, everything seemed to be going smoothly. 

Now I should mention that we were due to fly from Bangkok to Hanoi later in the day. A change of plan for us based on the fact that our 30 day visa for Thailand was expiring the next day and we had left it too late to get it extended. We had thought that we would just mix up our plans a bit, fly to Hanoi and do the remainder of our South East Asia itinerary in reverse. Seemed like a good idea. We applied for our Vietnam visa the previous week as the processing time had said 2-3 days. The day of our flight had arrived and our visa was still “In processing”. Not wanting to have to change plans again, that morning we had paid for the visa to be expedited within 4 hours. The estimated delivery time was 2.30pm, 4 hours before our flight was due to leave. It seemed that all was well. 

We made ourselves comfortable in a coffee shop and waited patiently for the visas to come through. 2.30pm came and went and suddenly our application was saying the delivery time would be 6pm. I contacted them and explained the situation and was assured that we would have the visa before 6pm and so should have just enough time to make the flight. So we went to the airport and sat sweating, checking our application every couple of minutes. We were starting to lose hope when, at 5.30pm, the visas came through! We rushed over to the check in desk, where the visas were scrutinised, but thankfully all was good and we dropped our bags and made our way to security. That was a breeze and we finally relaxed as we approached the gate with time enough to spare to grab some food. We aren’t really ones for standing in long queues when boarding is called, so when we walked up with only a few people ahead of us, we breathed a sigh of relief. The stress was over, we had made it, we were going to Vietnam. 

Or so we thought. At boarding, I was asked to show my visa approval again, and that’s when everything came crashing down. There was an error on my visa, the passport expiry date read 3033 instead of 2033. But the visa had been approved, surely this quite clearly stupid mistake, wasn’t going to prevent us from getting on that plane. Oh how wrong we were. We were refused boarding, escorted back out through security and passport control, a big void stamped on our departure stamp and we were taken to the sales desk where we were asked what we wanted to do. How on earth would we know what we wanted to do? We wanted to go to Vietnam but that wasn’t going to happen. I contacted the visa company and they said I would have to do a new application and then pay again to expedite that in order to have any chance of flying out the following day. We discussed it and decided we didn’t need another day spent sitting in the airport nervously waiting to see if my visa would be through in time for a flight. So we weren’t going to Vietnam. But we also couldn’t stay in Thailand any more than a day. 

After a few tears (from me) we decided that we couldn’t really face another night in Bangkok so we started looking for flights leaving that night. After a bit of humming and ha’ing we decided to go to Kuala Lumpur. It hadn’t been on our list but the flights weren’t too expensive and it would get us out of the country and give us a few days to regroup and replan our next steps. We booked the flight, checked in, suffered from some very real déjà vu as we made our way back through passport control and security and got the gate with plenty of time to allow us to book somewhere to stay when we got there.  Okay, the day hadn’t gone the way we had thought and it had cost us a lot more than we would have liked, but things were looking up. We were going to a new place. It’s all part of the adventure, right? 

The flight went smoothly, immigration went smoothly, we collected our bags and headed out to get a taxi to our accommodation. Now we could finally breathe. This extremely long day was nearly over. We would be in bed soon. 

When we had booked our accommodation, we had given our estimated arrival time of 2-3am. We now knew we would be a bit later than that and decided to message the property. We opened up the Booking.com app and were completely horrified to see that the property had cancelled our booking. Would the problems of this day never cease?! 

Our taxi driver took us to a nearby hotel, where we were very apologetically told they had no rooms available and that most of the hotels in the area were also full due an ongoing convention. Great. What now? Our original accommodation was a 10 minute walk away so we thought we may as well go and see if there was anyway our booking was still valid. On the way there, whether through exhaustion or stupidity, I fell and cut my knee. Just when we thought this day couldn’t get any worse. Hobbling the rest of the way, we made it to what turned out not to be a hotel but an apartment block. We asked the man on the desk and he said we had made a booking with a private host and would need to ring them. Of course there was no answer, why would there be at 4am. We couldn’t book anywhere else online because technically it was now the next day. So Ryan started ringing hotels. I probably don’t need to tell you by now that that was unsuccessful. So there was nothing else for it. We booked one of the few hotels online that had availability for later that day and got a taxi over to it. Our hope was that they would have a room available that we could just pay extra to get into now. Guess what, nope! No availability, so we have now been sitting in the lobby for the last 3 hours waiting patiently and hoping that time will go by just a little faster so that we can finally get to bed. So far we’ve been told the earliest availability will be 1pm, sure what’s another 5 hours? We’ve survived (just about) so we can hold out a few more hours. And that bed is going to be so good when we eventually fall into it! 

Update from the future: We survived! When the hotel staff changed over in the morning we were told there was a sky lounge on the roof that might be a more comfortable place for us to wait for our room to be ready. We went up to find ever so slightly more comfortable seats which we were able to doze on. At about 10am we decided to go get something to eat. The hope being that when we got back our room would be ready and we just sleep for as long as possible.

When we got back we could have cried with happiness when we were told our room was ready! After a quick shower we fell into bed and slept for a much needed 21 hours! Needless to say we feel like new people today and are planning to make the most of our unexpected weekend in Kuala Lumpur!