When Carrie and I were standing in line in the SeaTac airport, this couple in their 50s or so walked by and the scent of cheap Avon perfume made me nauseous. I turned to Carrie and said "I hope that woman isn't sitting by us." Sure enough, on the 9.5 hour flight from Seattle to Tokyo, on a 777 that holds 550 passengers, she sat right behind us. Then, to top it off, she complained when I turned our air vents on full blast and pointed them behind us to keep her stench away. So, here's a tip for the kids: never wear perfume if you're going to be on a plane. You'll be the only person who likes it.
Flying to Thailand takes a really long time. We arrived at 12:10 in the morning, and didn't clear customs until about 1:00. We had a short layover in Tokyo, where I considered fufilling a dream of eating sushi in Japan, but somehow airport sushi didn't seem to count. That's really all I have to say about the flight. Going through immigration and customs was adventureless, which is how it should be.
Getting from the airport to the hotel, however, was full of adventure. After reading plenty of guidebook recommendations and internet fora, I knew better than to accept the taxi offers of the people who meet you after clearing customs, opting instead to go to the queue of public taxis waiting outside. A woman looked at the address of the hotel, wrote something in Thai on a small piece of paper, handed it to us, and then pointed at a group of taxi drivers about 20 feet away. As we started to walk towards them, the guy closest to us started gesticulating wildly, but they weren't gestures that seemed to mean anything in particular. Because I had been walking toward him when he started, I assumed that he meant that I was doing something wrong, and that he had better correct my ignorant foreigner mistake immediately. So I stopped and waited for him to come to me (the taxis were parked closer to me than to him). My stopping was met with even more animated gesticulating, to which I turned to the ticket-writing woman for clarification for the meaning of the Thai "jelly-armed" maneuver. She pointed to them, and so we approached the now-frenzied taxi driver. Turns out he just wanted us to walk faster. I wish he had been familiar with what I thought was the universal "come" beckoning gesture.
So, a common strategy that taxi drivers use to swindle stupid foreigners out of their money is to quote them a fixed price rather than use the meter, and that you should refuse to get in the taxi if they don't use the meter. Well, that's what I did. Or tried to, in any case. Even when he was leading us to the taxi, we were saying we wanted him to use the meter, and he seemed OK with this. Still, I didn't get in until I thought he turned it on. So, once we started moving, I noticed that the meter wasn't on -- he had cleverly put his thumb on the meter button as if to start it, but he was really just turning on the radio and feigning use of the meter. I made a note and he quoted me a flat rate of 400 baht, which includes the road toll (about 12 dollars). This was a little higher than what I read it was supposed to be, but as I didn't want to fuss, I let it slide.
To make matters worse, he didn't seem to actually know where our hotel was, despite the fact that I had a map printed out with the address in Thai and gave it to him before we got in and he said it was fine. He pulled over to talk about the address and read the map more, but that didn't seem to help matters much. Then, he said "oh, by palace," meaning that our hotel was near the Grand Palace, and as they were only about 1/2 mile away from each other, I said yes. That, more than the address and map printed in Thai, seemed to turn his light bulb on, and off we went.
The going was fast. The limit was 80 km/hr, but we regularly hit 160. Oh, and there were no seat belts in the car, and I know because I was digging for them like crazy. Also, the dashed lines demarcating lanes in Thai freeways are, apparently, just suggestions. In practice, many drivers ignored them, and our driver led the way. It is not an exaggeration to say that we only spent about 1/4 of the trip within the confines of a single lane. To divert ourselves from what we were sure was our impending death, Carrie and I spent most of the trip looking at the sides of the freeway, which were littered with dilapidated shanties. Quite depressing.
But here is the most surprising thing of all: our driver pulls up to an alley with a little sign pointed inward to the New Siam II hotel (our hotel). I mean, this hotel doesn't have a roadside presence and yet he got us there immediately. If I didn't know better, I'd think this was the only hotel "near the palace." Also, he didn't charge us any special fees. 400 baht, as promised. We tipped him,(mainly because he didn't have 100 baht change, but also because we were extremely grateful to have gotten to the hotel in one piece) walked 50 feet to our hotel, and crashed on our rock-hard mattress.
