Chaos

The morning started at a relaxed pace before the chaos arrived! We had been arranging places to stay over Christmas as we were expecting the season of goodwill to be booked up. All was going really well until we received a message from AIRASIA - Your flight has been cancelled due to 'made up' reasons!

This flight we purchased at a good price but it seemed AIRASIA had now pulled the route completely. The flight was part of a booking that had a connecting flight that hadn't been cancelled. Already this year we have learnt that contacting AIRASIA is an absolute nightmare. First you chat to their automated bot and eventually, through asking ridiculous questions, you get through to the chat queue. The chat queue does show you your position ... usually in the hundreds! After waiting several hours you are finally connected to a person who tries to help. Though we are not sure 'help' is the correct word to use! They generally issue a case number, fob you off with 'the terms and conditions' statement. The End. We are not sure what happens next but it would seem the black hole of AIRASIA has taken all of your money and intends to keep it!

Phase 2 - The rebooking

So we asked for all flights to be cancelled on the booking. As they were on the same booking it appeared that both had to be refunded. We will see what happens! 

We searched for other flights to replace them, of course much more expensive than the originals. Half of the airline phone apps don't appear to work correctly. Visa restrictions complicate everything! The flight times mean super awkward layovers in horrible airports. No airline flies direct but via their main hub. Additional credit card security means tense moments as further sites crash and are reloaded, OTP messages sent....CHAOS NOTHING WORKS ANYMORE!!!

New flights booked = Relax. 

Now we just wait and hope we are refunded for the originals.

By now evening had appeared (yes, it took all day to sort flights!) and we needed food. Everyone else in Thailand would have ordered Grab - a food delivery service. You can order from even the smallest street sellers! We were heading to the Saturday Walking Street and that is where we hoped to find food.

The Walking Street did not disappoint. It was huge. Even better than the one in Chiang Mai. There was so much variety of food, clothes and entertainment. We watched singers, break dancers, line dancers. You name it it was there. We ate lots of small snacks that looked interesting before deciding on our main meal.  

We headed back to the little restaurant we had found yesterday.  We ordered 2 meals and took our seats.  We then heard someone shout 'you spicy'.  We turned our heads and the chef was looking at us.  We replied with the usual response in Thailand of 'a little' as otherwise the food is soooooo spicy it would be difficult for us to eat!  It always amazes us to see the Thais add huge spoonfuls of dry chillies and chilli sauce to already spicy food! 

We saw some 'things' flying around in a big swarm. We have seen lots of birds but these didn't seem quite as big and moved in a different way. Bats was our next guess but they didn't seem to disperse as bats do. Eventually, we decided that these flying critters were probably locusts. They were fairly big and there were loads of them.

We watched the line dancers do their stuff to various Thai tunes before heading home.