Although the Covid-19 pandemic certainly wasn’t over, 2022 finally brought a significant recovery in long-haul travel. Bruce and I envisaged one joint-venture extended trip this year, based on Thailand. The destinations within that country would be a mixture of the familiar and some new territory. For me, the arrangements would be relatively straightforward, insofar as any of our trips ever qualify for that description! Essentially, it was an ‘out and back’ arrangement, made a little more complex by a series of domestic short hops within Thailand and the fact that it was ‘out of the Netherlands’ and ‘back to the UK’.
Bruce’s itinerary, on the other hand, was far more complicated: his visit to Thailand was part of nothing less than a round-the-world trip. Leaving weeks before I did, he visited Barcelona and Los Angeles (via New York), then met up with friends in Oregon before proceeding to Bangkok via Seattle and Tokyo. My itinerary was carefully planned to converge with his in Bangkok. As we shall see, my own plans suffered something of a derailment, but the very existence of this post indicates that all was far from being lost.
Planned destinations in Thailand were Bangkok (x2), Phuket and the northern cities of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, the final pair being new to both of us. In the established style, here’s a taster of what’s to come:
