Arriving in Bangkok

Today, I walked the city for hours and hours, trying to find two things. First, a place to repair my camera that inexplicably stopped taking photos the day I left China. Second, to find the best deals I could find for round-the-world (RTW) flights. After walking what felt like every street in Bangkok, I found that no one was willing to repair Panasonic cameras and everyone directed me to the Panasonic factory customer service centre, closed until Monday. I also found that all RTW flights were expensive…. They started at over $2000 Australian, for just simple flights to the US and Europe. I was in the centre of cheap flights all over the world and there wasn’t a cheap RTW deal to be found anywhere. I felt demoralised. Returning to Big John’s Guesthouse – great location, clean, lovely staff except for John himself – I found that a bunch of Aussies had arrived that afternoon for the Asia Cup. One of the guys first thing gave me a web address that had heaps of RTW deals that look fantastic…. www.bestflights.com.au It’s an Australian company, all flights start and leave from Australia, but they have fantastic combination deals, they are flexible… maybe not as flexible as I want them to be, but not many international airlines fly in and out of the Democratic Republic of Congo… So it looks like I’m returning to Australia, a year earlier than intended… One week into my ‘world tour’ and making the decision to fly home was a little disheartening, but now that I’ve had time to process things I kind of like the idea. I have way too much stuff to travel comfortably, would be good to dump some of it at home. And I always like the idea of catching up with friends and family. But if I had done even the slightest bit of research on the net before arriving in Bangkok, blindly assuming that RTW tickets would be cheap there, I would have found that the discussion had been had on just about every travel forum that exists, time and time again, and the conclusion every time was that Bangkok is NOT the place to buy RTW. The best deals are in Australia, so everyone has been advised to fly to Oz and purchase there. If I had known this, I wouldn’t have bought a year of travel insurance that becomes null and void the minute I step into Australian soil… Anyway, a lesson about planning I guess….