Week 11 – Sunday 1st March – Saturday 7th March 2026. Hua Hin, Thailand, to Home, East Cowes. (The last week!)
Sunday 1st March
We wake up this morning to the news of a bombing in Dubai, with the airport and some hotels suffering damage, and the whole of the UAE airspace now closed. Most of the morning is spent discussing our options as our journey home is with Emirates via Dubai, with a two day stopover while we are there.
Will our flights be cancelled? Should we book an alternative flight now and risk not getting a refund on our original one? Should we leave it for a while, or will the flights fill up? We are very unsettled, but we get on with our day just the same.
Del has another much-needed haircut; after that, we use the gym for an hour, followed by a quick dip in our pool. We decide to go out to the local mall in the afternoon to have a drink and discuss our options further, as the window of opportunity is narrowing by the hour. The situation is getting worse, and Emirates has now offered us the option to request a refund. We find a couple of flights routed through China as alternatives, but agree to have an early dinner and get back to the hotel, where we can use the laptop to book flights and hotels instead of squinting and tapping away on a phone screen.
While we are out H decides to try a new massage machine. This one basically crushes you into submission. She did say that it was “deadly”.
Dinner is at a huge BBQ restaurant near the hotel. It’s very popular with the locals, and there’s only one other Western couple in there with us.
It’s quite a place – there are fridges full of trays of meat which you can help yourself from. There’s seafood, salads, cooked items and desserts; we won’t go hungry here, that’s for sure. It’s all you can eat for £6.50…! We assemble some plates of goodies and go to our table, which has had burning coals delivered to it.
We have a lovely time grilling and sampling everything. The locals are professionals at this. They have it all set up; they know exactly what to take and how to arrange it, compared to our slightly ad hoc, chaotic table.
Dinner done, we go back to the hotel and start looking at flights again. There will be no flights at all routed to or from the UAE, so we will have to go over Russia or through Africa. There is panic everywhere, and the choice is already dwindling. On brokerage sites like Skyscanner, 99% of flights are supposed to transit through the Middle East, and airlines are still selling them in the hope that the situation will clear up. We doubt it will…
It raises the question of whether it’s good for the world’s airlines to have hubs in the Middle East, or even to connect through there, given that it’s a notoriously volatile region. Eggs in one basket come to mind. Every flight we pick disappears as we try to buy it, saying it’s no longer available. We are starting to become desperate. After five long and exhausting hours, we finally find a route home.
Our new route home will now be Bangkok to Shanghai, Shanghai to Zhengzhou (we haven’t heard of it either, or know how to pronounce it!) and then Zhengzhou to Gatwick. All in all, it will take 56 hours, which includes 2 layovers at hotels. That’s not even counting the British trains and ferries that will no doubt do their best to add to the length of our trip home.
It’s a bit of a nightmare, really, but at least we will get home. Even if our original flight operates, we could end up being stuck in Dubai waiting for our next flight, which would be dangerous and expensive.
We go to bed at 1am, a little relieved.
Monday 2nd March
We both didn’t sleep very well last night, but we are up at 8 am to have breakfast and pack for our 4-hour journey to the next hotel in Bangkok. We have a car booked for 11 am.
Our lady driver turns up in a lovely car, and we are off to Bangkok. It’s another hot day today. En route, Del tries in vain to contact Emirates again about our refund, while H hammers the bank card some more, booking hotels for the Chinese layovers. She is consoling herself that she will hopefully get a chance to ride the world’s only commercial Maglev train from Shanghai airport into the city. We will have a few hours to have a quick look around.
Finally, we arrive at our hotel, The Rose Residence, which is nicely tucked away in a back street away from the Bangkok city chaos.
Our room is large and comfy, and you would never know you are in Bangkok. We fancy a bit of lunch now, and the poolside restaurant is highly recommended, so we give it a try. We have one dish each. H has a Burmese curry, which is lovely, and Del has a Massaman curry, which is fantastic.
We unpack and settle in. There will be additional luggage logistics when we leave here, as one of our new connecting flights has a lower baggage weight limit, just to add to the complication of it all.
The heat here in Bangkok is like a furnace, so we chill out in our room until it cools down a little. We are very close to Patpong Night Market, so we take a walk and look around it. They are only just setting up, but some nearby clubs are already touting for business. There are a few, shall we say ‘interesting’ shows here that some ladies perform in. We shall leave it at that!
We’re going to see all the seedy nightlife that Bangkok has to offer tonight, oh yes, we are going to see it all tonight… Next, we walk to Soi Cowboy, famous for its go-go bars and adult entertainment.
It’s early yet, but it’s already busy, and even a few ladyboys are advertising themselves. We sit outside a bar with a beer and people-watch. Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.
Next is Nana Plaza, which considers itself “…The world’s largest adult playground…” (we might as well get all this done in one night). It’s an indoor plaza, like a mall if you like, that is 3 floors high with lap dancing clubs, bars and…, well just ‘places‘…! We walk around the perimeter visiting all three floors. We have to walk through gaggles of ‘dancers‘ in bikinis who are giving H a few looks – there aren’t many women walking around here.
We do see some sights, it’s certainly an education. We get another drink and watch what’s going on. No cameras are allowed to avoid incriminating anyone. We leave after our drink. We have seen more than enough and educated ourselves on Bangkok nightlife. Now it’s time for the peaceful oasis of our hotel. We jump on a rather jazzy tuk-tuk for the exciting ride home.
The tuk-tuks here are not the standard small ones found in the rest of Asia, but more like souped-up trikes with loud music, alloy wheels, and LED lights all over them. We zip through the streets and are soon back at the hotel. Ah.. bliss. That’s better…!
Tuesday 3rd March
The breakfast at our hotel is lovely and à la carte, served in a very traditional dining room.
Del has breakfast but isn’t feeling great today. We get ready to go out, but opt to visit some malls first, as they are nicely air-conditioned and Del is not on top form today. H thinks that he should lie down, but he insists on going on, so off we go in a cab. He’s feeling worse as we walk around, and even the huge number of electronic shops can’t make him feel better, so we get another cab back. H goes out and buys him some drinks and some ginger tea. Leaving him alone to have a nap, H sets off into town to visit more malls. Like Malaysia, the malls here are huge, filled with expensive designer shops. One mall even has car showrooms inside from all the top manufacturers such as Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, and Maserati.
Once she’s had enough, she jumps on the metro and heads back. Del is feeling a little bit better and so wants to go out again. We find a cat cafe nearby, so we walk there, but it’s closed. It’s a big holiday on the Buddhist Calendar called Makha Bucha Day. Many places are closed today. We pass a huge temple complex and go inside to take a look.
People are praying, making offerings, and walking in a parade around the temple buildings, carrying flowers and candles. We light a candle in memory of our parents and put it on a water in front of a Buddha.
We have no idea what this is all about, but it’s nice to remember the people we have lost.
Tonight, we have received an email from Emirates officially cancelling the first leg flight from Bangkok to Dubai.
It looks like we made the right decision after all. Dinner is in the back streets in a tiny family-run place, rustic but delicious.
Wednesday 4th March
We have breakfast outside on the hotel terrace and plan to go out early to visit the large temple nearby. Before we leave, we receive another email from Emirates saying our refund submission has failed! Del is back in the queue for the online chat. Eventually, we get through and find out Emirates had split our booking reference into two different numbers and didn’t tell us. When applying for a refund on one reference number, they created another?!?! The operator has confirmed to us that we will receive a refund, which is a huge relief, having spent money on new flights and hotels.
The heat is like an oven, it’s so hot, low 40s, and it’s bouncing off the pavements. We arrive at the Wat Pho Temple, and H puts on her fancy wrap to cover her knees, as one must. This is the famous one that has the bloke lying on his side! We walk around the various buildings and temples.
It’s a huge place, beautifully ornate in the Thai style. After an hour or so, we are getting a bit weary despite drinking bottles of water.
We enter another building, always taking our shoes off, and Del moans, ‘It’s just more Buddhas in a row!’ What a philistine he is.
We can’t take any more walking, it’s just too hot, so we opt to go to a shady garden cafe/zoo slightly out of town called “The Little Zoo Garden” where they have lots of animals like capybaras, goats, nutrias, chickens and a deer. On the way, however, we spot a cafe doing mango sticky rice, so we can’t help ourselves, or rather H can’t, and stop and have some and a coconut ice cream. It’s delicious.
This is almost our last chance to have it for a while. We could make it in the UK, but the mangoes here are a different type. It’s fast becoming our favourite dessert ever, after an Ile Flottante.
The cafe/zoo is quite expensive, but for your ticket, you get a drink and a homemade cookie. We spent a good hour feeding the capybaras and nutrias, which look like large rats. They are all sweet and very gentle, and we have them to ourselves for a while.
We opt for a taxi back instead of the metro. Back at the hotel, we freshen up and go for a drink while we discuss options for our last night in Bangkok, indeed Thailand. We will go to the Yarowat Road tonight. It’s in Chinatown and is one of the two busy food-and-nightlife streets in Bangkok.
It is indeed busy with street food and restaurants, and neon lights all the way down it. We have a slice of pizza, some Thai fish cakes and some coconut pancakes. All very delicious. It’s a mad place, with so much food available, and this is happening in every Asian city.
Time to get one of those loud, bright, fast tuk-tuks back to the hotel.
Thursday 5th March
Today, we are leaving Thailand as our East Asia tour is now fast coming to an end. We are flying to Shanghai; it should have been our flight to Dubai, but that is all gone now. Some flights are running out of Dubai to back home, but they are prioritising the people who have been waiting the longest, and we can’t believe they are flying out of the airport whilst there are still drone attacks on the city. We certainly would not want to be taking off while that is going on with Iran just a few miles away.
We are flying with Spring Airlines today, a Chinese operator, we’ve never heard of them, but they check out ok on the internet. One of the few flights that we looked at when we were booking was Air Turkmenistan. Yes, we were getting desperate! However, once we saw their safety score, we quickly changed our minds. They had only recently been allowed to fly to Europe after some incidents.
The Spring Airlines flight turns out to be very good. We leave on time and get safely to Shanghai 4 hours later.
The bags arrive quickly, and we are through immigration and at our hotel in just over an hour. It’s 1 am when we finally turn in for the night.
Friday 6th March
We are up early despite being very tired. Our flight is at 22:30 tonight, so we have a few hours to see Shanghai. We check out of the hotel and leave our bags at the airport’s left luggage and set out to hunt down coffee and a croissant at the airport.
Buying things here is more complicated than we thought. We have signed up for all the payment apps here. Cash is not really popular for payment anywhere in China; instead, they use apps like Alipay and WeChat. You can’t buy anything without a code being generated and scanned through these apps. The apps are, of course, attached to your bank account. When you get it going and understand it, it’s actually not too bad.
We finally get our croissants…!
It’s the big day today, and we will get the maglev into the city. This is the world’s only commercially operating maglev train.
Surprisingly, it was built in 2003 at a cost of over $ 1 billion for the 30km track. It takes 8 minutes and travels at 300km/h (186mph), but it can reach 267mph.
We buy VIP tickets, of course, and get the carriage to ourselves. We set off, and the acceleration is quick. We are soon speeding at 300kph and tilting around corners. It’s fabulous.
We have a busy itinerary in Shanghai, including the old town, the Temple of the God of Heaven, and Yu Garden.
The temperature here is 10 degrees. It’s a shock after coming from 40-degree heat, and we don’t really have the clothes for it, as we didn’t expect to be doing this.
The old town is very pretty, and we have brunch in a very local food court; we are the only Westerners here. Again… The food is disappointing, but maybe we have chosen the wrong things. Next, we head to the Pearl Tower.
We notice that cameras are everywhere, facial recognition is widely used here, and any ‘bad behaviour’ by Chinese citizens is met with a talking to by plod. Even jaywalking can lose them their ‘social credit’, which is a state-led initiative to assess the trustworthiness of individuals. Any bad behaviour is punished by losing credit, which means restrictions on booking flights, using high-speed trains, exclusion from certain jobs, and public naming and shaming. Hmm.. Interesting concept, how long will it be until we get this.
This probably explains why the city is also spotless. This is our second communist country on the trip, the first being Vietnam, which is much more relaxed. In China, the internet is also restricted; apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube and many more are banned. We can use them, though, because we have foreign phones with foreign eSIMs. This is why there is a high rate of phone theft in Europe now (especially in London): the phones are then sold in China to circumvent banned websites and apps.
The Pearl Tower is a distinctive landmark in Shanghai that resembles a rocket. The view is a bit hazy, but interesting.
The city is massive and sprawling. There’s a glass walkway, which is the scariest one we have done as it’s 260m high, overhangs the tower and is very clear.
There is a fabulous media display and a VR coaster, which H goes on.
It’s very good – a real roller coaster on which you wear a VR headset which displays an animated world; it’s a bit scary not to have decent restraints and not to be able to see the track ahead. H grips on, which is unusual for her.
Del fancies some duck, so we go to a highly rated duck restaurant.
It’s high up in a department store, one of the cleanest and flashiest we have seen, with a view of Nanjing Road, and it has the most delicious melt-in-the-mouth duck we’ve ever had.
We are fast running out of time, so we walk to the riverfront to see the skyline. Truly spectacular, with the opposite river bank lined with huge skyscrapers all lit up and showing video and bright lights all over them.
We have to rush back now and take the maglev back to the airport to pick up our bags and check in for our flight to Zhengzhou. The China Southern flight is excellent, and we touch down dead on time in Zhengzhou at just gone midnight. It’s minus 1 degree here, and we are cold to the bone. The wait for a cab is horrendous. Eventually, we get one and arrive at the hotel, a fantastic Marriott, very nice and comfortable. It’s 2:30am when we go to bed.
Here are a few more snaps from our 36 hours in China
Saturday 7th March
We are up at 9am, tired once again, and have breakfast. As we are checking out, we see a food delivery driver come into the lobby and drop the delivery into a slim box on wheels with a screen just inside reception. It’s a robot that sets off for the lift, chatting away to itself in Chinese.
It somehow calls the lift and enters, goes up to the floor and then the room where the delivered goodies are dropped off. We have never seen anything like this. China is far more advanced than any other country in terms of things like this.
Zhengzhou is a well-known city in China; it is the birthplace of Chinese civilisation and also home to the world’s largest iPhone factory, run and owned by Foxconn.
It’s a pretty grim-looking place, though, grey and very industrial. It is probably better in the centre of the city, we will never know, as we are staying at the outskirts near the airport.
We board our flight and leave on time. The flight goes smoothly; it’s on a 787 Dreamliner, which we haven’t been on. Very nice, quiet and comfortable, but we prefer the giant A380. We arrive at a grey, soggy Gatwick slightly early after 11 hours. Our airline, China Southern, was very good. The food was ok, the service was very nice, though there weren’t many Western films on the entertainment system. Top marks though…
We have a 55-minute wait at Gatwick for our bags, and have to run for the train that will connect us to the 9 pm ferry; we make it just in time. If we missed the 9pm, then we would have had to wait until midnight for the next one. We finally walk through the door at home at 10:30 pm, very tired and jet-lagged, but grateful to be home safe and not stuck in Dubai.
…and finally…
We have been away for three months, departing the UK on the 15th of December 2025. We have visited Dubai, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, ending with an unexpected but excellent, short trip to China.
It has been a fabulous trip, missing most of the UK winter, which was our plan. We are grateful that we have been able to do it. It has taken a lot of planning and research, most of it done by H, who found us some excellent flights and brilliant hotels.
We have seen and done a lot. Seeing how other people live, work and get through their day is truly an education. You don’t have to go mountaineering, bungee jumping, living in a hut in a jungle, or daft wunderlust things. Just walking around, eating, travelling and mixing with local people is rewarding in many ways. We are all the same, really. We need to work to put food on the table, keep a roof over our heads, and try to stay healthy. No matter where you go, that, in the main, is what everybody wants. Unfortunately, we are so polarised now, and governments don’t help; in fact, they make it worse. The problems we have here at home are just the same in all the places that we have just visited.
During this trip, we have stayed in 17 hotels (and 1 apartment) and taken 12 flights (plus 7 more for Del…)
We are now home and planning our next trip, this time in Jess, our home on wheels. The plan is to sail from Portsmouth down south through the Bay of Biscay on Brittany Ferries to northern Spain, drive through the middle of Spain to the south, then turn back up and drive north along the east coast of Spain and into France and back home via Le Shuttle, seven weeks all told, back in time for summer on the island.
Again, thank you to our family and friends who have followed us on our Asia trip. It’s just a load of rambling we know, but it helps us to remember in more detail what we did all this time we have been away, and we are happy to share it with you.
We would like to send you our very best wishes and to encourage you, if you can, to “get out there“. The world is a wonderful place, really, with some wonderful people, despite all that’s going on in various places.
See you soon…
Del & H
Looking forward to that.... xx