Round The World and other travels

From the sublime to the fairly forgettable!   Traditionally, you had to fly the so-called boutique airline Bangkok Airways to get to Koh Samui. With the route opened up to Thai Airways, I selected them for two reasons : first, because I was connecting from TG601, and secondly, because at the time I booked the flight, I thought I would need the status miles to re-qualify as a bmi Gold.

Anyway, boarding of the rather tatty 737 was absolutely chaotic. Several people who were sitting in Business Class moved back when the real passengers for those seats turned up. I don't think it was completely a case of brass-necked trying it on; I got the impression that at least two groups of passengers had some of their number upgraded and the others were seeing whether it would be possible to stick together. Incidentally, seating forward of the curtain consisted of three rows of reasonably chunky seats in 2+2 formation, reminiscent of Domestic First in the USA. The seats looked as though they had seen better days. I found the seat numbering odd on two counts : first, because even on this short-haul aircraft, it observed the Oriental standard that single-digit row numbers are reserved for First Class, and secondly because it used long-haul lettering. So normally I would have said that I was in 2F, but it was actually numbered 12K. Bizarre!

There was a pre-departure hot towels service and we were offered a choice of orange juice (which I had) or ice tea. We pushed back just a minute down by my watch and took off at 1615. The flight time was reported to be 50 minutes. In-flight service consisted of a little fruit tart and a choice of tea / coffee / coke / water / orange juice / ice tea.

This very short flight came to an end at 1703. We had to execute a U-turn at the end of the runway in order to return to our allocated parking position, which was reached at 1707.