Two weeks before I was due to book my flights to Australia I got a call from my globe-trotting sister currently residing in New Zealand. She told me that she would be marrying her beloved Columbian boyfriend in my beloved Thailand. Can you come to the wedding? You can stop off on your way to Australia! This was surely as good an excuse as I was ever likely to get to make a return to sweet Siam some ten months after I had bade it a tearful goodbye.
I had my tickets, my convoluted travel itinerary and the promise of some work in Australia so I was pretty much all set. Until my sister's wedding plans offered me an excuse to divert to Southeast Asia on the way. 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 this would be nowhere near enough time for me to reaquaint myself with a part of the world where I had spent eight cracking months of the previous year. So, I extended my stay to one month. In order to reduce the catastrophic impact this deviation would have on my meager funds, I opted to spend most of it in neighbouring Cambodia where a beer could be had for $0.75 U.S., a meal for a dollar and accommodation for a fiver.
When news of my intentions broke to my only two friends still in gainful employment they resolved to accompany me on the Southeast Asian leg of my trip. Denis, a long-time buddy and frequent traveling 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 in 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.
In the run-up to the Carry clan's departure to Thailand for my sister's wedding to her Columbian boyfriend, I began to feel slightly alarmed at her choice of location. 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 drive to a place called Pak Bara pier from where I could take a three-hour ferry to Koh Lipe. I felt OK about making it, 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 a connecting flight to Hat Yai. Sadly, I massively underestimated his capacity to make an absolute dogs dinner out of carefully laid travel plans with catastrophic results.
The arrangements were simple - I was to meet Denis in Bangkok Airport at the check in desk for a flight to Hat Yai, the details of which I had emailed to him weeks in advance. "If I don't see you in the airport," I remember saying, "I'll see you on the plane." Sadly, when I stepped off my long haul from London Heathrow and wandered up the 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 catch and could not 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.
