"Welcome to the Kingdom of Thailand"

After a 35-hour odyssey that started in Ottawa, Ont., at 4:00 a.m. on Monday morning, I finally arrived at my destination: Thai Wake Park (Bangkok). The long flights are now but a blur, and the sleep on a hard rock mattress was well worth it. My reward? Waking up to a beautiful warm sunny morning! ahhhh....

Surprisingly the trip over here was pretty uneventful to say the least. But I mean let's be honest, flying commercially from North America to Bangkok is pretty tame by today's standards. Perhaps the biggest adventure at this point would have been deciding what movie to watch or whether to eat the airplane food.

It was not until I landed in Bangkok and stepped out of the comfort realm of an international airport did I feel as though my trip had finally started. Needless to say that it took me over two hours to leave the airport after waiting for Yan Tibo and Benjamin Leclair who were flying in from Montreal, Qué. As it turned out they arrived an hour earlier than anticipated and decided to forgo the one hour and a half wait for my ass.

So anyways with the boys MIA at Thailand customs and immigration, I decided to grab a cab to TWP. I thought for sure by having a map the cab driver would know where to go. Hmm yeah, not so simple. 

For those who don't know, Thailand is coming off some of the worst flooding the country has seen in decades so getting around Bangkok is not a given. Luckily for us the floodwaters have receded considerably, but the aftermath is clearly visible and to see it first hand was pretty heavy to say the least.

After much convincing, the cab driver finally agreed to take me. After taking a little detour to avoid a washed out road, my dude pulled up to TWP and I couldn't have been more relieved. I was greeted by a sweet lady "Canada? Yan? ya ya, here here," she said. 

Sure enough I find them in a room no bigger than a janitor's closet, two bunk beds, and my mattress on the floor. Still running on North America time, figured I'd pop a gravol to help the transition. At last I was comfortably asleep before I could even begin decipher exactly where I was in the world and how I ever got here.