Well just when we thought we were getting things all roughed out on what we thought our journey might look like, something changes. Usually change is good, and as we are finding out more and more as we plan this trip, this time is no exception…
The latest change is an Air Asia seat sale!! Now who would have thought you would need to have a seat sale when the price of a ticket from one end of the country to the other (think Seattle to San Francisco, or Edmonton to Vancouver for the Canadians in the audience) is normally around $50US, but we discovered last night that most destinations in Thailand have been discounted to $99BHT (the current exchange making that the princely sum of $2.81US) – of course with all the taxes and airport fees that will jump substantially to just under $10US to basically fly anywhere in-country, but I think we will be able to suffer through it!!! I suspect it will cost me more to get the family to the airport on the songthaew (kinda of like an open-air taxi) than the cost of the airfare and taxes. Clearly our domestic airlines could learn some lessons here.
We had originally planned to maybe take the train up north to Chiang Mai and only take the plane a couple of times for the longer hops we had in mind (down to Phuket for example). The train takes the better part of a day (or overnight on the night train) and would cost about $18US so initially it looked like a good choice, and a bit of an experience, but now for about 1/2 that we can make the same journey in about 1/10th of the time and get more time ‘on the ground’ at our final destination. The experience won’t be the same, but I suspect we will not be lacking on opportunities for experiences in the time that we are there.
Additionally, we may now make some other short hops that we had dismissed before. We had looked at places in the north-east, and eastern part of Thailand like Udon Thani but had removed them from our list because if we were going to go to these places that were so far apart then we would either rack up a fair amount of air travel costs (think 5 people x $50 per person), or lose a lot of adventure time sitting on a bus or train. It also opens up the option for us of going to a completely different country in the area if for some reason we were so inclined – flights to most of the surrounding countries have been discounted to $12US, so about $20US with all the fees. In fact, one of Rachael’s gym friends spends the summer in Singapore, so things like this make it possible to look at popping around to ‘bump into’ people we know, just 1/2 way around the globe.
At the end of the day hard to know if it will change our list of places to go or not, but it has made us start thinking again about places we had pushed off to a list for perhaps a future trip.