track our trek

after another dreary, rainy morning, we were more than ready to say goodbye to china...tired of being ogled and hustled and harassed, and fed up with the pushing and spitting, we headed for the xi'an airport wednesday afternoon. (don't get us wrong, we'd like to go back to china someday...there's a lot that we missed & we'd love to see the southwestern provinces to see where many of china's ethnic minorities live...we were just ready for a break) ...the catch to saving $400 usd on our tickets to bangkok was that we flew into chengdu from xi'an at 6pm and didn't leave for bangkok until 12:30am...6 hours in the airport...then arrive in bangkok at 2:10am...no sweat...we're seasoned travelers at this point, right? so we had some dinner in the chengdu airport and then found some metal chairs to nap on for the 4 hours we had left before they would let us through customs...(this time i was the one subject to scrutiny at chinese border control.) before we left xi'an we'd checked out www.sleepinginairports.net ...no really, it's a website full of advice on the best corners in different airports for catching a few zzz's while you wait on a plane. so there was lots of info about bangkok....apparently a lot of overseas flights land here between midnight and 3am...not sure whether security would be different b/c of the coup, we decided to play it by ear...we also read while waiting to land in bkk that an onward ticket is required to go through immigration...hmmm...a slight problem since the only tix we have say we're arriving in bkk oct 30 and leaving dec 13...longer than the permitted 30 day stay...well, we figured it was out of our hands & we'd see what happened...we passed lots of people camped out sleeping peacefully in the darkened lounge areas outside the "visa on arrival" office on the way from the gate to immigration. thinking we might be forced to call american airlines to confirm the changed dates for our flights we jumped in line & took a deep breath...the woman stamped our passports and waved us through with a smile! very cool!! welcome to thailand! the airport was surprisingly alive at that time of morning! by 3:15am we found another set of seats on the second floor and stretched out to sleep until around 7am when shops opened up and we could navigate by daylight...