This is my first trip back to Thailand since covid, almost 3 years exactly. Basically it's been a clusterfuck of my poor planning and Filipino culture. I haven't slept since I woke up yesterday morning so if these posts seem off, well I am.
Due to my superior trip planning skills we basically did an overnighter at Manila, we arrived at 12:30 am, with a flight departing for BKK at 7:20. I don't what the heck I was thinking.
When checking in at Manila, we knew we had to an exit tax of 1620 pesos (~1000b) which didn't surprise us, but when I got to immigration, I found I had the opportunity to pay another 2880P (1800B) for the privilege of leaving the country, for my exit clearance to be sure I wasn't a wanted criminal in the PI. Oddly enough, I'm not. After that was done, we found our gate, which was both mercifully empty and equipped with a charging station as I had drained my phone playing Pokemon Go.
The wife and I stretched out on a set of chairs and get a power 30 minute doze in when a large group of very loud Filipinos invade our space. For the life of me, I do not understand why Filipinos do not have an inside voice when speaking to each other so obviously our naptime came to an end. Fook!!!!!!!!!!
I will say both of our flights, the one from Bacolod and the one here both left either early or on time and both arrived early. Kudos to Cebu Pacific in that regard, however there isn't much legroom on their flights and the whole non-reclining seats thing sucks. For the international leg we'll do Air Asia next time.
One of the posters here asked about coming in from Africa, I saw a health check spot where everyone from Africa or South America had to apparently check in while on my hike to immigration. There was a sign from the terminal that we arrived at to immigration was 990m, nearly a kilometer. A fucking amazing considering every terminal between ours and immigration was empty of life.
We get out of the terminal looking for a taxi and I see a stand that says Electric Taxis. Being in a stupor from the lack of sleep I focus on the word taxi and they send us off with a driver. Well, what we didn't catch is that this was a VIP electric taxi service, which only cost us 450B to go from the Swampy to our AirBNB on Srinakarin Rd.
Of course the apartment wasn't ready so we were able to leave our luggage there and head over to the Nine on Param 9. I was dying for a Subway sandwich and there's a Max Value there so we could pick up some sundries while getting a damn fine sandwich.
We get to Subway and they start building our sandwich, they're building our sandwiches when seeing me hold a 1k note they announce they don't take cash, only electronic payment, so the wife whipped our (her) credit card and tried to pay. Guess what, Subway's wouldn't accept our card, so they ate the cost of two finished sandwiches, mine a footlong BMT with double meat. We checked with our bank and everything was fine on their end.
We get back to our apartment and it's really nice. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms, wood floors and a nice balcony overlooking nothing but another hotel. It's one of the nicest places we've stayed. Tonight its off to surprise the family, that should be fun.