My last day in Thailand, my departure flight was scheduled for midnight. I arranged late checkout with the hotel so I was able to use my room until 4pm. I like hanging out in parks and botanic gardens, so I decided to spend the last day in Lumphini Park, one of the biggest and most popular parks in Bangkok.
After little more than an hour of walking in beautiful hot sunshine I arrived at the park. It’s great to have a place in the middle of the city where you can escape from the noise and pollution. It wasn’t really clean air, but at least all the vegetation and the lakes make you feel like it’s a healthy place.
In the morning the park is said to be crammed with people doing their morning exercises, Tai-Chi, cyclists and more. It’s probably one of the few places in Bangkok where it’s safe to ride a bicycle. I didn’t see a lot of people but it was already around lunch time. I saw a few groups practising Tai-Chi and Thai sword fighting, it was interesting to watch.
While walking around the park I noticed some sort of monitor lizard on the lawn and started taking photos. Then I noticed an even bigger one only a few metres away. Just when I wanted to take some more photos I noticed an even bigger lizard in the background, sitting on a palm tree. This one was huge, it was easily two metres long. They simply lived there in the park, no gates, no cages. Lumphini park was full of these huge reptiles.
I really enjoyed the time there. Lumphini park is great to spend a few hours sitting on the lawn enjoying the sun, the palm trees, the lakes, or watching the monitor lizards.
On my way back to the hotel I bought fresh fruit for lunch and spent the remaining time watching tv on my bed. Unfortunately I had to check out at 4pm but my airport taxi wouldn’t pick me up until 8pm. I dressed in warmer clothes than necessary since I was going to fly to Frankfurt and temperatures in Germany were around -10 C compared to the 35 C in Bangkok. So I spent the time until pickup at the air-conditioned hotel bar listening to music. Later they even started with live music, it was kind of funny to listen to the Thai piano player who was singing all sorts of English classic songs in very strange interpretations.
At the airport I was impressed again, what an amazing airport! Everything modern, clean, perfectly organised. Very short ways to the gates – Frankfurt is a horrible shit airport compared to Bangkok, an absolute maze!
I was going to fly with Lufthansa this time and have never had a flight with them before. In Germany they have a reputation for being a premium airline, so I was even more disappointed when I boarded the airplane, a Boeing 747-400. Either the airplane was old, or they tried to save some money on the interior decoration. The seats didn’t have LCD displays integrated into the head rest, instead there were old tv’s hanging from the ceiling above the aisles. So everyone had to watch the same, whether you liked it or not. A 12h flight without your own LCD that you can turn off anytime is just painful. And since they didn’t turn off the bright tv’s during the night and didn’t even bother handing out eye masks, I found it impossible to get some sleep. Their cabin service may have been alright, but I was totally disappointed with Lufthansa. The service and the interior decoration on flights with Qantas is lightyears ahead of Lufthansa. Compared to Qantas Lufthansa looks like a bunch of wannabes.
In the end we were actually lucky to get landing permission in Frankfurt, we arrived around 5am local time and were one of the first airplanes on that day. Only hours before the whole airport had been closed for several hours due to extreme snowfall. I wasn’t sure what to think of the heaps of snow with a temperature difference of -40°C compared to Bangkok – only hours before I had been wearing shorts and t-shirt.
