Bangkok palace hotel

There is a seventeen hour break before our next connection. The airline has provided us a room in a hotel. It is a thirty minute drive, but first we need to clear immigration. Again we are at the mercy of Thailand's famed service and what should ordinarily take five minutes takes well over half an hour to complete.

The name of the hotel provided by the airline is "Bangkok Palace Hotel" and it evokes illusions of grandeur. It is anything but grand but we are happy that we have a room to stay. We reach the hotel at 5 am and are surprised to find the lobby throbbing with activity at that early hour. This hotel is used by tour operators and there are tourists waiting to board buses to their next destination. It is 5:30 a.m. in the morning and the receptionist says she cannot check us in until 7 a.m. because rooms are unavailable. My blood boils and I am ready to raise a stink but there are others ahead of me who are promised rooms at 6 a.m. waiting who try to calm me down.

We commandeer a couple of sofas and plop down on them. At 7 a.m. I ask and am given a room. I wake up around noon and head downstairs after a shower. Outside there are several shady characters all waiting to take me to a massage parlor. I head back inside and check out the eating options none of which are attractive.

Someone recommends Sukhumvit Road for lunch and we head there. There is one particular place that I have heard off and we ask the driver to take us there. But the driver knows very little English and I am not sure if he knows where the place is. We ask him to drop us off at the nearest location instead. Later on we learn that he was indeed trying to tell us the exact location.

At 5 p.m. we head back to the airport.