Home again home again

Here’s some trash I wrote on my horrible journey home:

The mission begins after an exhausting and confusing sleep – of course tonight is the night Austin changes for daylight savings. My flight is at 6.35am. So what time do we need to be there? And how does daylight savings fit into all this? We are out drinking the night before, of course, and as was predicted, we misjudge the time and I arrive at the airport hurried, flustered and still very much asleep, an hour ahead of schedule. I say a not-wanting-to-leave goodbye and burst into tears. Emotions are running high for everyone, but there is no time to waste – the others have a 16 hour drive ahead of them today to Santa Fe, so with me asleep, crying and coughing, Gordie Good Times pulls away from the curb full of my loved ones and leaving me alone. I sit in Austin airport for two hours snuffling and crying (why is this all so emotional? I’ll see them all in less than two months), it doesn’t help that I have a terrible cold. Finally, my flight to Chicago boards and I immediately pass out. I arrive and wait two more hours and then repeat pass-out on the flight to New York. When I arrive at JFK I am exhausted beyond belief, ravenously hungry, sick, upset and broke. And I am facing a 10 hour wait. There seems to be no internet in this gigantic airport and I really need to check on the flooding situation in Thailand. 

I repeatedly fall in and out of consciousness in inappropriate places. I cough up horrible stuff. I cry again for no reason. Finally I can check in. The lady at check in takes pity on me due to my sorry looking appearance and the impressive coughing fit I have in front of her and reserves a whole row of seats for me. I think she thinks I am contagious. After another seemingly eternal wait we are allowed to board. But why is this taking so long? Oh, because there are plain clothed FBI agents at the plane door randomly pulling people out for interrogation. We are flying to the Middle East after all. Once on board I immediately fall asleep. I wake at one point being tucked in with a blanket by an air hostess. Sometime later the same hostess wakes me and tells me I should eat something, it’ll make me feel better. I think I ate, I’m not sure. I return to my passed out state. I am awoken again around 7 hours later by the same lovely hostess saying the same thing and handing me some food. As I chew on the undercooked rice and chewy paneer I mull over the fact that this is the most sleep I’ve had since Hattiesburg, Mississippi, nearly a week ago. I fall back into my now-natural state of pass-out and am awoken by the jolt of the wheels touching down. 

So here I am again in Kuwait airport, waiting another 10 hours. It’s freezing in here and people won’t stop staring at me. At least Kuwait Air is kind enough to give me a meal pass to their “transit lounge”. This sorry excuse for a lounge is a scungy cafeteria with an exceptionally low-grade selection of food on display. I eat an apple. What am I supposed to do for the next 8 hours? I am too tired to read, and soon I will be too tired to write. Oh no. My eyes are starting to wiggle again. I need to find somewhere to sleep asap.

I wake up at one point and think, “screw this, I’m going to sleep in the van”. Then I remember I am very far from the van. The team will probably be waking up in Santa Fe around about now. I finally find some internet and check out the flooding situation in Thailand, it’s not looking good. I mange to talk to Stu and Sarah, it makes me sad. Finally it’s time for my entirely uneventful flight to Bangkok.

Wow. The flooding is bad. I made it to the bus station with 3 minutes to spare until a bus left for a town kind of near where I live. If I want to go direct, I have to wait another 11 hours and that’s not happening. The bus creeps at a snail’s pace along the highway. There are cars parked on both sides of the highway to keep them on higher ground, as below us, there is only water. We pass the domestic airport and it is really bad – I see planes with water up to the cockpit windows. We pass around 20 parked armoured tanks; I suppose they need to stay dry too. I am instantly back in a totally foreign land. It is so hot, the a/c doesn’t work and it takes us 4 hours to get out of Bangkok. There are people setting up camps and stalls all over the highway. People are padding around in boats and other make-shift flotation devices. There are crudely constructed jetty’s everywhere to try and keep people away from the floating mountains of rubbish, no doubt teeming with disease. I wonder if the others have made it to Albuquerque. I think that all our complaining about being too hot in the van was for nothing. I am melting. It’s taken no more than 20 minutes for the perm to be relegated to a tight bun on the top of my head, and there I’m sure it will stay for the next two months. I think of how very different this traffic jam is in comparison to that of the one we were stuck in in Houston, Texas only a few days ago. We’re driving through pretty deep water right now, there seems to be no rules, traffic is just driving where and how it can, no matter what side of the highway it is on. I calculate that it’s been about 50 hours since I was dropped off in Austin. 

We finally make it out of Bangkok and onto a dry highway. I instantly fall asleep. I wake up when we get to Tak, my destination. I am told that if I want a bus to Mae Sot I will need to wait another 9 hours and it will only be $4. It’s 10pm. Someone offers me a ride in their car straight to my front door, I’ll be there in 1 hour. It’ll cost me $60. I take it. This guy is a maniac driver and I think that it’d be a shame for me to die this close to my final destination. But eventually he gets me to my house. I’ve never been so happy to see my bed. I shower for the first time in 5 days and as I get into bed I realise that this is the first time I will have slept without at least 2 other people in the bed with me in over three weeks. It’s going to be a wee bit lonely. But I am finally home.