Country: Thailand
Location: Bangkok, Chiang Mai & Phuket
Ten airplanes. More than fifty hours in a seat. I flew from Tampa to the far side of the world for an e-commerce summit, got swept up in a festival of floating lights, and picked up a stomach bug I won’t soon forget. Here’s how Thailand went.
My day started at 4:15 in the morning on October 26th, and I wouldn’t touch down in Bangkok until 11 at night on the 28th. Southwest to San Francisco first, where they still charge $35 for a bag and still don’t assign seats. I lucked into an aisle. We hit some real turbulence too, and let me tell you, there’s nothing like being in the airplane bathroom the moment it starts. I grabbed breakfast at Bar Dough in Denver, and the reviews lied to me. The bacon came out cold, actually cold, with the grease congealed on it. I don’t know how a kitchen gets three different temperatures onto one plate, but they pulled it off.
From San Francisco I flew Korean Air through Seoul. Thirteen hours, and I never once put the seat flat or fell asleep. The plan was to stay up until Bangkok and then sleep for twelve hours straight. That is not how it went. Seoul’s airport is a stunner, with ceilings that feel three hundred feet tall, and the men’s room even has a stall with a bidet. I’ll let you guess which one I picked. I got to my flight feeling fresh.
Bangkok
I rolled into the Conrad Bangkok a little after midnight, into a residence room with a full kitchen and a wall of windows looking out over the city. If you’ve never been, Thailand’s 7-Elevens are on another planet. They’re basically small grocery stores stocked with genuinely good food, and there was one attached to the building.
The next morning I met up with Hersch, hit the hotel gym, and then we went to a local sauna and cold-plunge bathhouse. It was not swanky. Picture a metal warehouse roof, half open to the outdoors, a little run down, with a group of women sitting outside the doorless men’s room with a clear view into the locker room. Surprises and all, after that flight the hot-and-cold cycle was exactly what I needed.
Bangkok moves at night, so a scooter is the way to get around. On the Grab app, which is Asia’s Uber, you can actually hire a scooter. If you’re not comfortable weaving through traffic toward oncoming cars, you might want to skip it. I thought it was a blast.
Bangkok
Chiang Mai
Getting to Chiang Mai was its own adventure. I forgot I had to check a bag and bolted out of the hotel so fast that I left without checking out. The airport was spotless, with vacuum robots prowling the halls like they owned the place, and right by my gate was a massage shop. I spent 450 baht on a one-hour leg-and-shoulder massage and it was incredible. If you’ve got the time, do it.
My days in Chiang Mai ran from wake to sleep. I was there to speak at an e-commerce event called Cross Border Summit and help run a couple of masterminds. By pure luck it overlapped with Loy Krathong, the festival of lights, so the city was packed with visitors from all over the world. One night the conference put on traditional Lanna dancers against a wall of fireworks, and it stopped me in my tracks. Between sessions I slipped away to see the old city’s temples, gold spires glowing against the dark.
On the last night, we all walked down to a canal and floated our krathongs onto the water. The street food market on the way back smelled incredible, but I couldn’t quite work up the nerve to eat any of it. My stomach would end up thanking me for that.
Chiang Mai
Phuket
On the flight down I spotted a group in matching shirts that read “PHUCKET, I’m going to Thailand.” That’s exactly how I’d always read the beer label back home, and it turns out they were digital nomads circling the globe. Our flight got delayed two hours and we boarded dead last, but I hit the jackpot with both seats next to me empty on a packed plane.
Then the trip caught up with me. My buddy Mike woke up with a stomach bug, and a day later it was my turn. I’ll spare you the details past saying it came from both ends and ran a solid 36 hours before I could eat again. We moved from the villa to a resort five minutes down the road, where I checked in early and slept from half past noon straight through to nine the next morning. By the time I felt human again, I had just enough left in me to appreciate where I was.
Phuket
The Long Way Home
Getting home meant another stack of airplanes and an eight-hour layover in Bangkok, where Mike and I wandered a mall so big it had an IKEA attached to it. I’ll say this plainly: business class is a game changer for long-haul travel, and I can’t imagine doing it any other way. It’s also absurdly expensive. My flights ran about $4,500 at the budget end. As we dropped into San Francisco I was just happy to be back in America and one leg closer to home, and the closer I got, the more I felt how much I’d missed my wife and kids. After ten airplanes and more than fifty hours in airplane seats, I was finally home.
