Airports, Airplanes and Layovers

Our first flight is with China Airlines from Incheon to Taipei and only takes 3 hours. The flight is packed but the service is excellent. Shame about the lunch - we ate the different options and both were terribly bland.

My first thoughts, once inside, Taipei airport are "oh crap", it was a dump! A horribly dated sevice-less dump!! But what can we do? We have 7 hours to kill and the last city tour left almost 30 minutes ago.

So we go do the transit thing; turns out it's just a security check and up an escalator and suddenly we're in departures. This dump of an airport isn't looking any better.

Determined, as we are, to get through the 7 hours with our sanity inact and to find the transit hotel, we begin walking. After 20 minutes we have found the end of the terminal and seen the tantilising view of what appears to be a much newer part of the airport. We gaze longingly through the windows, both of us transfixed by the promise of time killing diversions in a building where salmon floor tiles would be scorned...

So we keep walking, we hit more dead ends but we keep going.

After over an hour of teasing glances and depressing facilities, we happen upon a ramp with grey (!!) carpet. Mike is close to a run to see what is around the corner and up the ramp... it's salvation!! We have found the new building! Yeah!!

We pass the remainder of our time using free massage chairs (oooh yeah), free internet (and if we'd been dishonest free laptops too!), walking and then we succumb to the transit hotel. Due to the price, we just hire a room for 3 hours; we wanted the sauna but it costs just as much as the room again! The transit hotel room was $39 (US) for 3 hours and for that we had our own bathroom, TV, queen bed and floor to ceiling view of cars driving around the airport.
A bath and a Van-Damme movie and it was time to go.

On the way to our gate, we found the blind massage place and as they kindly suggested we have the 30 min upper body, we went for it. It was one of the most painful and hard massages I've ever had! Good though.

The flight to Bangkok has better food but sadly the service was abismal! (China Airlines) Considering the flight was almost empty - that's pretty bad! I watched "The Last Kiss" which while it was very good, I found it disturbing (probably because it didn't have a saccharine ending).

At last we're in Bangkok and the new airport, Suvarnabhumi, is massive ugly. Not massively ugly. Clearly the designer either has a thing for glass and steel beams or he has an interesting stock portfolio. Sadly most likely the second. Mike's been reading about the problems at this new airport and seems determined to blame anything going wrong on the airport. Granted cracks in the runway are a terrible problem. Narrow walkways are an annoyance - no wonder this airport can only handle 5,000 more people a year that good old Don Muang. We get through immigration, clear customs and find the downstairs public taxi rank quite quickly.

Mike feels its just not the same to arrive at this new airport - even the taxi ride is different. It's 2am so long as I'm in a relatively comfortable taxi, I really don't care. It feels cooler than on other visits and I am hoping that it's the night. I guess we'll see tomorrow. At least the worst travel day is over.