Well we reach the final installment of the trip (about bloody time I hear you cry), this won’t be a big post, but I wanted to keep it separate so I could add some thoughts about the trip as a whole.
Day 17 and 18
Flying back to London today. Despite the previous night’s excess the five of us heading back to London were all up in plenty time for our last breakfast in Bangkok. After a quick check out we were back on the mini-bus for the journey out to the airport. All plain sailing, straight through check in and security. Had a nose around the shops and spent the last of our Thai baht. Our flight to Bahrain left pretty much on time and was uneventful and Adele even got an alternative to steamed chicken and veg, a fish dish. Changeover in Bahrain was short and all running on time. We arrived at Heathrow slightly ahead of schedule, but this caused more problems as we had to sit on the runway as another plane was at our stand. Not that it really mattered especially when we got back to passport control, the queue was huge and talk about being brought back down to earth with a bump as the rudeness and me me me attitude reared it’s head as folk were trying to queue jump and push through.
Once through we picked up our bags and then said our goodbyes. As the flight had got in after the last flight had left for Edinburgh we were spending the night in the same hotel we’d been in on the way out. Richard and Sarah had a 2 hour or so bus journey ahead of them to get home (but that wasn’t leaving until after 11 – it was about 10 when we parted) and Liz’s boyfriend had come out of London to pick her up. We had a short walk to get the bus to get round to the hotel which fortunately was at the stop so we got straight round. Dumped our stuff in the room and back down to the bar for a night cap and to watch the highlights of Scotland being rubbish at football.
Sunday morning we were up early again for the first flight north to Edinburgh and we were soon back home holiday all over. Thankfully Ollie hadn’t trashed the place, but Fiona had been popping round to keep him fed and watered and only as he can showed his gratitude by hissing at her a couple of times when she was in. Then it was back to normality with a trip to Tesco for the essentials.
So looking back what a trip and it was difficult to believe it was all over. Yes there were niggles here and there, the delay getting from Vientiane to Phnom Penh being the major one but although these were a pain at the time, over the piece their impact was negligible. We had a wonderful time and met some lovely people. We were lucky we had a good group of travelling companions and were spoilt with the local guides – Wassan, Tui, Vichet and especially Chamroeun. I did start to write out what my favourite aspect of the trip was there, but deleted it again as I don’t think I can pick just the one favourite place or thing. Although the one thing I would say is that if anything I was slightly disappointed by the Angkor Wat complex. Perhaps I’d built it up too much. Don’t get me wrong it was still impressive, just that I found the other temples more interesting. It may have been because they were more of a surprise as I didn’t know as much about them. According to Chamroeun and Vichet this is apparently a regular comment from folk they take on these tours around the various temples at Angkor. With regard to Exodus who organised the trip, we would definitely use them again.
Right I think that’s it. It’s taken me longer than I thought to get all this onto the blog, part work, part photo processing, part sheer laziness on my part but at least it is all up before our next trip away (I’m not counting the trip home for Christmas). You are probably sick of this but just to repeat you can see some of the photos from the trip up at my flickr account and I may be adding to that in the coming weeks as I hadn’t really looked at the photos taken on the compacts, and there may be more photos with people in them in that selection.
