Today could have been called a "day of waiting", a not unusual situation when travelling. The task today was to fly from Paro, Bhutan to an airport hotel in Bangkok to be in a position to catch a late afternoon flight to Sydney tomorrow. Because the flight was international we had to be at the airport at least 3 hours before flight time. Thus we left the hotel at 9:00am, arrived at the airport 9:20am (Paro is a small town and traffic is/was light). The airport is small with few flights and small planes, so by 9:45 we were checked in, through immigration and security and just waiting. Of course the flight was delayed to 12:15.

Paro airport turned out to be quite interesting with lots of displays of art and craft work, a number of special lounge areas with comfy chairs to display that art/craft and open to all passengers, and a bookshop that seemed devoted to Buddhist pulications. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the airport from a passengers point of view was no departure board and no public address system. So us passengers had no way of finding out which gate our plane departed from. Needless to say almost everyone resorted to asking random employees.

Bangkok was hot, 36°C, and the airport was crowded. Today is Thursday and the up coming weekend is Easter.

We had a booking at an airport hotel called Amaranth Suvarnabhumi Hotel, (Suvarnbhumi is the name of Bangkok Airport) which is refered to as an "airport hotel". It is an interesting comment on the size of Bangkok as this "airport hotel" is 13km and 20 minutes by taxi from the airport. In Sydney that's like calling the Park Hyatt at the "Rocks" an airport hotel. Regardless the Amaranth was a good quality business hotel and a comfortable place for us to spend 24 hours waiting for our Sydney flight.