A One-Way Ticket to Bangkok

I’ll alternate with a story from the trip now. Those last few months in Morocco I worked on my resume and started to send it out but then realized that I couldn’t focus on the future – all I could handle was finishing things up in Morocco. And similarly, though I love to research and plan my travel, I couldn’t do it. I had bought a book on Southeast Asia (all of it! The Rough Guide) when I was in New York in June, and I had decided on Thailand because my friend Edie’s brother had said it was a good place for women traveling alone and on Indonesia because my father used to live there and when my aunt died I promised myself that the money I got from her (which I really used to pay bills, since I was unemployment) would go towards a trip to Indonesia – so I had my sister send me Lonely Planet Thailand and Lonely Planet Indonesia. A fellow volunteer lived in Thailand and traveled in Indonesia and she drew a rough map for me, showing where to go in both countries. And then I bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok. That’s all the planning I did. I kept referring to the map, but I didn’t start reading the books until I was on the way to Thailand. Plan-as-you-go turned out to be a lot of fun, though once I realized that Christmas and New Year’s were coming, I did start planning a week or so out, and that worked out well. Not that I’ll ever travel that way again!

Flexibility was required, too, because about a week before I was scheduled to leave, protestors closed the airport in Bangkok. A contact there (more on her later) said that Bangkok was safe other than where the protestors were and not to worry about that (though the State Department did issue a warning and I did register with them). I watched for news every day and got a hotel in Madrid with internet in the room specifically in case I had to make other plans, but I didn’t make any other plans – I just hoped the airport would open in time. And it did – just in time. My flight was one of the first to get there (I was on Air Berlin; the U.S. carriers weren’t recertified yet when my flight was cleared). An interesting beginning to the trip!