Landing in Bangkok Thailand for the first time in 1998.

I was tired, exhausted from a 14 hour flight from Chicago, where we had a 6 hour layover and we had spent 3 hours in Toronto before that. We flew economy on a seat no more comfortable than sitting at a padded kitchen chair at a family Thanksgiving supper that lasted for 13 hours and with 200 people cramped in barely enough room to move around. My legs cramped, my clothes reeked, I was so tired, I no longer cared if I was hungry … and at the end of the flight when they opened the door of the aircraft, I hoped for a cool breeze but was instead met with a warm moist smelly smog. I said to my wife that it must be a hot day which is why it was hot at midnight in the dark (I would later discover that it was actually a cool day!). We walked to the main terminal, dragged ourselves off to the passport line and shuffled our way to the exit to get our bags, then fought for an hour with taxi drivers who spoke terrible English and promised us passage to the dark side of the moon for $10. We had to figure out who had the best price and WOULD NOT carry us away to be murdered. I nearly fell asleep on the damp sticky taxi drive to the city to our ‘hostel’. He drove us off the freeway and onto dark roadways, then to a side street filled with what looked like street gang thugs and drug addicts … we thought we were done for and that we would be tortured for our bank accounts before our dead bodies got thrown in a city dumpster. It was 2am, in a deep dark noisy, ugly, smelly, hot, sticky city. The taxi driver motioned us to a narrow passage way with a little light. We said no, he said yes, yes. We were so tired, he could have just murdered us there. So we went and at the end of passage way it opened up to a wide brightly lit patio with shoes everywhere and a smiling young Thai woman who said ‘Welcome to Tavi Guesthouse!’.

We had arrived at the hostel we had rented through some weird new service we had just learned about called ‘email’ and we had made a bunch of calls using about $50 worth of long distance minutes to find and book this place.

We checked-in in a daze. The Thai lady could have charged us $1,000 a night and we wouldn’t have cared. The place was simple, basic and cheap … it was only $8 a night.

When we finally lay down, I took off my clothes and hugged my wife as we drifted off to sleep. I couldn’t believe we were in Thailand. My first international trip outside of Canada (I had been to the US but I felt like it didn’t count because the US is a lot like Canada). I had to let go of her and move to my side of the bed after a minute because we were both stinking hot. It was all a complete shock to our systems because we had left Sudbury in February at -40 degrees and within 24 hours arrived in the tropics at +40 degrees!

I watched the slow moving fan over our bed and tried to imagine it was cooling me off. I held her hand and we drifted off to sleep.

I felt like I was in a dream.

I was so happy. I was so tired. I was so amazed.