Thursday, December 4, 2008
Bangkok Dangerous: When Travel Plans Change
I had booked my ticket to Yangon
back in September and I'd been planning this research trip for over a year. When PAD protesters swarmed Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok last week, everything I had been looking forward to seemed on the edge of collapsing.
My Burmese visa stared at me like an unused ticket to the Glastonbury Festival. I was only a week away from my departure when the 'yellow-shirt'
demonstrators annexed Bangkok's main airport, stopping all inbound and outbound flights for a week.
I'll give it a few days, I thought. They can't last longer than that.
But they did. The protesters stood their ground for over a week, blocking the only affordable route into Yangon. On Monday - day 5 of the siege - I panicked. I called my travel agent frantically trying to rebook the Tokyo-Bangkok leg of my journey to arrive in some other city in the vicinity.
"Oooh..." she said, like a doctor 
peeling off a make-shift bandage to assess a gangrenous wound. "It doesn't look good. I can cancel your flight, but it's so last minute everything else will be booked. But let me check..."
Suvarnabhumi is a gargantuan monument to Thailand's tourist industry. Although easy to navigate, passengers often have to walk down the half-kilometer concourse to their gate - assisted by super fast conveyored walkways.
I guess I'll just have to forget about Burma and just head to Ko Phangan to spend a month writing. Not terrible, but not Burma either.
"Oooh," my agent said again, but with a different tone - more like finding a crumpled twenty in your coat pocket. "I found something. From Toronto to Singapore via London. And...it's cheaper than your original flight."
So in lieu of the horrific Toronto - Tokyo flight (I've done it several 
times; one feels lobotomized afterwards) I now have a lovely overnight British Airways flight to London with a twelve-hour layover. Just enough time to jet into the city to meet a friend for lunch near the Tower of London, perhaps see Buckingham Palace and Harrods, feed some pigeons before heading back to Heathrow for another overnight B.A. flight to Singapore.
I suddenly felt fortunate for the change, for those persistent protesters locking down the airport and stranding over a quarter million tourists. After all, now I didn't have to rush to my destination, but could take my time getting there, adding two nights in Singapore at a brilliant little hostel in Arab Town, as well as an epic night-train journey to Kuala Lumpur.
Sure I arrive in Yangon four days later than I'd planned, but who doesn't love having lunch in London, a quick jaunt in Singapore, and a serene train ride through the Malaysian countryside to make up for the inconvenience?
Now that flights to/from Bangkok have resumed, I can't figure out whether the moral of this story is not panic and prematurely cancel a flight or whether, in the face of several thousand determined Thai monarchists, to use the well-honed flexibility of the backpacker to try and come up with a Plan B that rivals Plan A - to appreciate the journey more than the destination.
Because isn't that what backpackers are good at?
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