Indochina Express - Day 23 (Bangkok to Cupertino)

March 25

After 23 days, it is time to head home. We enjoy one more breakfast on the river and then Yokie and our driver pick us up for the ride to the airport. It is only mid-day in Bangkok, so traffic is not very heavy, and we get to the airport with a lot of time to spare. We get one more picture with Yokie:

and then head through security. We have plenty of time to do some shopping and get rid of some of our remaining Thai money. We don't see any stores that sell Thai art that we could fit in our carry-on bags, but we do visit a store selling gold jewelry. I'm lucky to get Beth (who never spends anything on herself) to buy a pair of nice gold earrings because she didn't do the Bhat to Dollar calculation correctly and thought that they cost much less than they actually did! We also buy a couple of bags of cashew nuts as Thailand is one of the biggest producers of these nuts and the cost is much lower than we can get at home.

Finally, we all board our flight to Taipei, Taiwan where Chris and Mark will connect with a flight to Toronto while we head on to San Francisco. Since we lost a day going west, now we get it back. Beth and I will arrive in San Francisco only four hours after we leave Bangkok even though we will spend nearly 16 hours in transit. The good news is that traveling east, we will have a tail wind for most of our trip which will cut our travel time by perhaps two hours compared with going west.

The first flight lands in Taipei in the late afternoon. One of the advantages of flying business class is that we get to kill time in the "VIP" lounge. We have some dim sum and caffeine and think about our strategy of when to sleep on our flights to minimize jet lag. Finally, it is time for Chris and Mark to board their flight, and we walk with them to their gate. One of the interesting things about the Taipei airport is that the international terminal gates are on two levels: you show your boarding passes/passports on the upper level and then board the flight from the lower level. Each of the upper gates has a theme. Chris and Mark's gate looks like a city park with trees and park benches to sit at while waiting. We say goodbye and ask them to think about where in the world they would like to go next and then head off to our gate which is laid out like a lunch place outside a train station.

Once on the plane and in the air, of course they feed us, which gives us something to do for an hour or so. My vaguely Chinese dinner looks better than it tastes (maybe I've adapted to the spicy food we've eaten during our trip). After dinner, I decide to go with the "do what you would do in the time zone that you are traveling to" strategy while Beth decides that she is not tired and will just stay awake reading the whole flight. Since it is now very early morning in California, I try to go to sleep. But after a couple of hours of unsuccessfully trying to get to sleep, I decide to read a while, watch where we are on the globe for a while, and play some of the games on the video display for a while. We arrive in San Francisco a little early and Uber home. It has been a great trip!

To everyone who has been reading this blog, I hope that you have enjoyed it. We strongly recommend travel to this part of the world! I'm sorry that it has taken a month after we returned home to complete it, but I had over a thousand photos that needed editing. If there are things that I could have done better, please leave me a comment and I will try to incorporate them into future blogs. Speaking of which, my next blog will probably be for our trip to Milan and Cortina, Italy for the Winter Olympics in February 2026. I hope that you will join us for this adventure!