The last night of my trip started with a nap…
it was just good planning. Afterwards I
decided that my last dinner should be the best Thai food I could find. As I was walking around Khoa San road,
Bangkok’s famous backpacker district, I overheard a British guy saying that he
was in culinary school. So, naturally, I
stopped him and asked if he knew where the best Thai food in Bangkok was and he
wrote down the name and address of a restaurant called Bo Lan. After a 100 Bhat (around $3.50) taxi ride
across the entire city, I got to the restaurant. It was easily the best meal of the entire
trip and coincidentally the most expensive meal I’ve bought myself. A few weeks after I got back, Newsweek had a
special on the top 101 places to eat in the world and guess what, Bo Lan was on
it. Good work British Guy, I owe you
one.
After a fantastic, though wallet draining,
dinner I headed over to the area that gives Bangkok its reputation,
Patpong. There’s a thriving night market
with the typical tourist paraphernalia and there are still touts trying to sell
their services, except that here they aren’t tours. After checking out the area I headed back to
the Khoa San area for the rest of the evening.
When I got back I decided that one last massage sounded like a good
plan. An hour later, I counted up the
rest of my Bhat and decided that another one would be an even better plan. By the time that was over it was close to
4:30am and I headed back to my hostel.
After showering I realized that there wasn’t much point in sleeping now because
my van to the airport was leaving at 6am.
So I skyped with a friend who was backpacking in Holland, then packed
up, got a few McDonalds breakfast sandwiches and got on my van to the
airport.
Getting home was a NIGHTMARE! My original
flights would have only taken around 36 hours;
Bangkok-Mumbai-Newark-Chicago-Columbus.
Then one of those flights got canceled and I ended up flying from
Bangkok to New Delhi where I had to wait for 14 hours. Then I got on a plane to Paris where I couldn’t
get off before heading to New York (JFK).
From there I had to get to my other flight which was still out of Newark. It’s a good thing Southwest isn’t nearly as
incompetent as Air India and I was able to switch my flight. My flight out of Newark was delayed for about
2 hours due to inclement weather but I was still able to make my connection in
Baltimore because of the length of my layover there. I arrived back home around 11:45pm on July 24th. The whole ordeal from door to door took
almost exactly 53 hours, 27 of which were in the air. A somewhat large consolation of this is that
it only cost me $850 to get home from the other side of the world.
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