Home page

1. I Agreed to What?

2. Flight to Bangkok

3. Bangkok, at Last

4. The King's Birthday

5. Jem's Old Home in the Village

6. New Rice Storage House

7. Rice = Money

8. Mealtime

9. Jem's Family

10. Impressions of the Village

11. The Mall in Korat

12. Gordon and Pu

13. Pink Palace

14. Village Elementary School

15. Two Temples

16. Visiting Cousin Loy

17. Jem and Village Headman

18. Phimai

19. Back to Bangkok

20. Looking for Our Old House

21. Shopping

22. Thai People, My Impressions

23. Photography

24. Language

25. Flight Back Home

Kohn's Corner    

3. Bangkok at Last

We landed at Bangkok a few minutes after midnight. Amazing, to fly from the other side of the world, change planes at two airports, and arrive within ten minutes of the announced time.

For the record, we’d left Augusta at 0930 on December 6, and arrived at 0005 on December 8, with a day lost crossing the international time line. All things considered, it had been a fine trip. Sure could have been a lot worse.

Now then, how would we get to Korat? Would Jem’s family find us at the airport? Or would we spend the night wandering the airport until dawn?

After retrieving our suitcases (with no security check two years after 9/11), we entered a waiting area full of people standing behind crowd control ropes. Most were from hotels, holding up signs for their tourist guests.

Jem waves, and in the crowd I see a hand wave back.

We were picked up by Jem’s sister Sangjahn and her husband Samahn. Also present was another sister, Jang, and Sompahn, her husband. The owner of the rented van was also there. Why, I don’t know, maybe to see the unusual visitors.

The van was a new Toyota Commuter, a vehicle I’ve not seen in America. As its name declares, it’s perfect for transporting a group of people, up to ten plus a driver. Its diesel engine is as quiet as a gas model, and its manual transmission was shifted so smoothly I had to check to see if it wasn’t in fact an automatic.

This van had been bought by a villager to be rented, mostly to other villagers and typically on a daily basis. How he will make his money back I have no idea. Then again, when I look at most commercial businesses, it escapes me how they can be profitable, much less make the billions of dollars they’re sometimes sold for. I’m so lucky I made my life’s career in the Army, where profit and loss have never been on a meeting’s agenda.

We paid 1,700 baht, a little more than $40, to be picked up and brought to the village. That might not be a bad business if the van were regularly rented, but most days, as we later saw, it stayed parked.

At that time of night, the 4-hour drive from the airport to Kokpra Village was on empty roads. Of course I wasn’t sleepy, with 3 AM in Thailand being 3 PM back in Georgia. I peered out the window the whole way.