Two weeks before I was due to book my flights to Australia, I got a call from my globetrotting sister who’s currently residing in New Zealand. It was very good news: she was getting married to her beloved Colombian boyfriend – in my beloved Thailand.
“Can you come to the wedding?” she asked. “You can stop off on your way to Australia!” Of course I can, I said. It was as good an excuse as I was ever likely to get to make a return to sweet Siam some 10 months after bidding a tearful farewell.
Assorted family and friends, it was arranged, would be gathering on a southern Thai island called Koh Lipe for about a week, but I decided that a mere seven days would be nowhere near enough time for me to reacquaint myself with the country.
So I extended my stay to one month. But in order to reduce the catastrophic impact this detour would have on my meagre funds, I opted to spend most of it in neighbouring Cambodia – where a beer could be had for US$0.75, a meal for a dollar and accommodation for a fiver.
When news of my plans broke to my only two friends still in gainful employment, they jumped at the chance to accompany me to South East Asia. Denis, a long-time buddy and frequent travelling companion, would come along to the wedding and for the jaunt around Cambodia while Luffo, a pal who has been working in Beijing for the past two years, would skip the ceremony but meet us in Phnom Penh for a week.
Although my months back at home were pretty miserable, I did leave on a high. My flight took off the day after Ireland beat Wales to take the grand slam, and Bernard Dunne showed the heart of a lion to win a world title after one of the greatest fights the boxing world has ever seen. The dire state of the economy had the Irish people hurting, but it was no longer in our character to stay down for long.
As the Carry clan began to converge on Thailand, I began to feel slightly alarmed at my sister’s choice of wedding destination. Getting to the venue – the tropical island of Koh Lipe – was a serious trek.
After arriving in Bangkok I would have to take a connecting flight to the southern city of Hat Yai. The arrival times meant I would have to overnight there before getting up at the crack of dawn and taking a tuk-tuk from my hotel to the bus station. Then it would be a three-hour bus ride to a place called Pak Bara, from where I could take a three-hour ferry to Koh Lipe.
I felt okay about making the connections, but various travel parties had booked different flights at different times, and I wasn’t sure if my mother, aunts and other family friends not necessarily used to such endeavours would make it without being stranded somewhere along the way.
I didn’t, however, have any doubts about my buddy Denis, who was to meet me in Bangkok for the connecting flight to Hat Yai. But sadly, I massively underestimated his capacity to make an absolute dog’s dinner out of our carefully laid travel plans – with catastrophic results.
The arrangements were simple: I was to meet Denis at the check-in desk for the flight to Hat Yai, the details of which I had e-mailed to him weeks in advance. “If I don’t see you in the airport,” I said, “I’ll see you on the plane.” But when I stepped off my long haul from Heathrow and wandered up to the appointed place at the appointed time, he was nowhere to be seen.
Maybe he’s checked in already, I thought. So I dropped off my bag and collected my boarding pass before heading towards the gate. When it came time to board, I was starting to feel somewhat uneasy. I walked slowly to the plane with pretty but cross Air Asia flight attendants trying to hurry my inexplicably slow progress.
Where in the name of Jaysus was he? Did he miss his flight in Dublin? Did he make it as far as his transfer in Abu Dhabi? There was nothing I could do – I had a wedding to attend, and I couldn’t afford to miss that flight. So the door slammed shut, the seatbelt light went on and we flew away, leaving Denis to his unknown fate…
To be continued…
