Well. This is almost too good to write down.

In years and years when someone asks what the funniest thing in our trip was, the answer is going to be ‘Rescheduling tickets at the Thai airways office in Phnom Penh.’

Anyone expecting the hotel restaurant to be open at 6am was going to be disappointed. No trouble procuring a tuk-tuk out the front of the hotel though; those guys don’t seem to sleep all that much. Although he wanted $4 to go over to the office, and claimed that it was a long way away, across town. We offered $2.50 and then $3 and he says OK $3. It was about a twenty minute ride, but anyone expecting a huge line to have already formed out front of the Thai Airways office was about to be profoundly relieved. There about ten people there, and it was 7.15am, and they weren’t going to open until 8am. A French lady came over and asked us if we spoke French or English.

English.

OK. You are twelve, she says. Pointing to the people next to us, ten-eleven-twelve, pointing at us.

OK. Thanks.

And all the other people were lined up waiting were old people. Marvellous.

So we stood around, and thought about what we might do if they offered us this or offered us that, or what we really wanted to do, in other words. The best case, let’s say was that we get rescheduled to a flight on the same day, or maybe the airport’s open and we don’t need to change flight at all, and then everything goes ahead as normal and we get to go to Hawaii. Or it gets moved by a day and then we call Hawaiian airlines and they don’t mind moving the flight to Hawaii and then we still get to go to Hawaii, but only for four days. Or maybe we can still go to Hawaii but we have to pay a fee to move the flight. Which we don’t really have spare money to do. But it’s Hawaii. And it’ll be nice hotels and a volcano walk. And Kona Mountain coffee. So maybe we just go ahead and pay it. But Hawaiian airlines only flies to Sydney every other day, and returns on the even days. So we’d have to stay somewhere in Sydney for the night, although there’d be someone we could crash with. No problem. Worst case; flights are delayed by some time and we have to pay extra to stay in Phnom Penh for quite a while. Or we have to pay for the tickets home to be rebooked, in which case we have a real problem.

A little before 8am we see the staff turn up in their orchid purple uniforms and go on in the back door, and twiddle about and turn the computers on and generally look like people who were working until 10pm or 11pm the previous night, which was, we heard, when they started having to turn people out of the Thai Airways office.

The French people at the head of the line started to shake their heads and flap their hands a little, until around ten past eight the front doors opened and people rushed for the ticket machine. Some guys from way behind us in the line came sneaking around the side to try and pinch a ticket they hadn’t lined up for. I didn’t really think we’d have time to explain the anti-borgnine rule to them, and the people in front of us seemed determined to let them push past, so I stuck my sticky fingers in there and grabbed a ticket as well.

Number 11.

And we sat down. Another five minutes or so passed. The lights lit up and the staff started calling people to counters. We set ourselves to wait for a bit and got cups of water from the cooler over the other side of the store.

The elderly couple came over and said ‘excuse me, you took the ticket from in front of us, could we change?’

Now where was the assertiveness when those guys were pushing in round the side? But Alice was thinking, and had a plan, and had taken a ticket as well. So now the elderly couple had our precious No. 11, but we had No.12 and No 14.

And we waited some more. Then a fellow in trousers and one of those hunting vests with about 400,000 pockets all over them, in tan, maybe 50-years old, came walking in the door with his regularly dressed companions and marched straight up to the counter. And expected everyone to do something other than go very far away. But he had missed his flight.

‘No. You must wait your turn, just like everybody,’ said the man already waiting at the counter.

And on like that for several minutes, while the important man explained about he shouldn’t have to wait. And convinced nobody of anything at all.

Sometime after 9am we had the pleasure of stepping up to the counter, and presenting our existing tickets, and asking the nice lady if they had any way to know if the airport would be open by next Tuesday, and if we would need to rebook our tickets. We wouldn’t be needing our ticket No. 14. So we gave it the pregnant lady sitting next to us, showing her the one we already had. And you could say she was quite pleased about that.

Bad news at the desk, though, where the nice purple-orchid uniformed lady read our tickets and typed things in the computer.

‘Ah, airport is close until 5th December.’

Then we had our turn at waiting for 10 minutes or so while some computers checked in some databases and figured out some convenient combinations of the many ways that we might be able to get from Phnom Penh to Sydney.

‘Can we still fly on the 2nd December, next Tuesday? Is that possible?’, we asked.

‘2nd December is all booked, I am sorry sir, still some flights available on 3rd December.’

Now this is the point that we looked at each other, and had that little giggle which translates as ‘That was a good idea you had insisting that we get up at 6am to go to the airline office.’

A bit more waiting. Then we got offered the 3rd of December, via KL, but the nice lady was unable to rebook our flights for us because we booked them through a third party.

Eh?

We didn’t book directly with Thai airways; we booked through STA.

‘Booking through agent, the agent must have authorise, it’s OK, I give you authorisation code, sir, and you give code to your travel agent.’

Now that would be our travel agent, STA, at Broadway Shopping Centre in Australia. Would they even be open now? What’s the time difference. Two Hours. So we went out onto the footpath, and I had a good rant about how travel insurance is where you pay them, not where they pay you, and Alice called the travel insurance people, on her mobile, internationally, there being no other option, and waited on hold for them to confirm that because of the delay being due to political unrest, they would not cover the cost of new tickets. If we couldn’t Thai airways to rebook them for us. If the magic authorisation code could not, eventually , be made to dance and do our bidding. We’d bought our tickets and passports and all that with us but somehow the piece of paper with the phone number for STA travel broadway on it was back in the hotel. So then Alice called her parents, internationally, on her mobile, there being no other option, and got them to look up the phone number for STA travel.

And we didn’t have a ticket to get back in the line. So even if STA travel could rebook for us from our end, or authorise something, or do something, somehow, we still might have to get up at 6am tomorrow and come back to the office again, seeing as there were notices in the office confirming that due to circumstances they would be opening Sunday. Until midday.

Emma, our reliable and faithful travel agent, was not there. Damn. Eventually she got passed to the duty manager, who hadn’t really heard of this sort of thing before, but found a space on the computer which looked the kind of place you might, as the travel agent, write notes for other people, and he wrote that little reference number in that space, and we said thanks very much.

Now, the next thing was, just as we were coming back inside from our marathon of expensive international telephone calls, the pregnant lady had just finished having her flight rearranged, and she was waiting in the doorway for her companion, who was squaring away final business with the lady at the counter.

‘Hello. Could we, perhaps, have your spare ticket, if you have one?’ is what we could have said, if she didn’t turn out to be Japanese, and speak OK english, and be a little unsure as to why we wanted the ticket they’d already used.

‘No, your spare, your other one.’

‘Ex-cuse-ah-me?’

Now due to us being the friendly people who gave her ticket No. 14, once she translated what we were asking – and weren’t we lucky at that point that we were dealing with someone who could understand us – was only too happy to give us her left over ticket No. 18. And happy to wish us good luck, and ask us where home was, and apologise several times for not speaking good english. Clearly adequate to the task though.

Ticket No. 18. One million points for the person who can guess what number the desk ladies were currently serving… yes, No. 16.

When 18 flashed up on the counter, it was the same lady we spoke to before, so that saved explaining about the code, and she went right ahead and printed us out a print out of our available options. And the earliest one was still direct from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, then KL to Sydney, at 11.30am, on the 3rd of December.

That’d have to do, then. The lady set about rebooking our tickets. And we looked at each other thinking ‘How on earth did we just get away with that?’

She printed out the new tickets. She highlighted the dates and so forth. We repeated the numbers out loud. And we said thank you very much, and asked if we could still choose our seats on the night flight from KL to Sydney. But we had to go to the Malaysian Airlines office to do that. And they wouldn’t be open on the weekend, what with the lack of any huge crisis staring at them.

So we got our tickets home. You can call it good luck. But it was a bit more than that.

Out front, we called STA again and reassured them whatever they had done worked, and thanked them very much. We did also hug then. The tuk-tuk drivers knew what was happening and were waiting around after dropping people off to join what was now a pretty extensive line. Some of them probably people who waited in line all day the day before, and got nothing for it. The driver wanted $5 to get back to our hotel, but then we recognised each other from earlier in the morning. It was the same driver! So then the price became $3 again. And along the way, on a main road, while I took pictures of Alice holding up the new tickets and smiling, I dropped the lens cap for the camera, and had to run back and get it. Oops.

–

The phone number listed with our tickets for Hawaiian Airlines was available on the weekend, but being no more than the ticket office, they were quite happy to charge us the small amount of $250 each to rebook our flights from Sydney to Honolulu. Not to speak, even yet, of our flights from Honolulu to Sydney. Secreted away in the Hawaii tourism prize pack was the business card of a certain PR contact. So we went to plan B; leave her an email today or tomorrow, then on monday call up and see if she was willing to ‘help us’ move the flights. Makes sense, right? I mean, they’re already paying, what’s the difference to move some flights? Right?

–

OK. Deep breath. Having said goodbye and thank you to Nak the previous night, after dinner, we were at our liberty, but equipped now with a grasp of the town layout and the things we might want to see and do before we leave, possible forever. At the Thai restaurant next to the hotel, which we seemed to be living in lately, the head waiter spoke fairly good english, enough to know what Vegetarian meant, and was only too happy to provide a vege Pad Thai, just like the ones we used to have on Harris St. in Ultimo. We had lunch there and then walked all the way along Monivong Boulevard to find the central markets, which were right near the bus station. The central market building is a bit odd-shaped; it looks kind of like the spokes of an old car wheel, laid sideways, with a big space-ship bump in the middle, then heaps of tarpaulins draped all around the edges. Inside you could buy pretty much anything; watches, clothes, food, shoes, toys, trinkets, wigs, live crabs, and even small embroidered patches of the Cambodian flag, for which we could not resist parting with a dollar.

In the modern shopping centre a little way up the street from the central market, we went poring through the ‘DVD’ shops on the upper floor, where we came across a certain Mr Jamie. He was getting a bus next morning, with Amanda, back to Sihanoukville, to have a few more days at the beach until their respective flights, which had also been moved, departed. Dinner tonight sounded like a great idea, yes.

We walked on back to the hotel. We watched the documentary about S-21 Toul Sleng which we’d bought for about $3 in the ‘DVD’ shop. We resisted paying, I think it was maybe $50USD, for a box with just about every Simpsons episode ever in it. We washed some socks in the sink. We had a shower which we skipped in the morning to get down to the office faster. We took the laptop for a walk to the internet place across the road and paid $1.50 to send off some emails to certain PR persons, and to our possibly alarmed parents, and so forth. And SMS’d friends to see if we would be able to stay with them in Sydney.

Downstairs, we swapped Horror Flight Rearranging Stories with Jamie, Amanda and Ella, and then we strolled off together to find a restaurant along the waterfront, on Sisowath Quay. Ella had been unwell early in the morning, but seemed OK now, or capable of eating dinner anyway. At our outside table we had a very nice dinner and then split up into the ladies, who went to some lady-place to get their toes and toenails inspected or injected or decorated or something, and the men, i.e. myself and Jamie, who walked back to the hotel but stopped at a trendy looking bar, and sat in comfortable chairs, and drank beer. And discussed the relative absence, lately, of a world financial sector. Jamie actually works for UBS, a large swiss bank, and sort of understood how some of it works.

Because he was going back to the beach, and because we hadn’t taken a single one of our malarone tablets, we gave him enough out of our boxes to last a few days, and bid himself and Amanda goodnight and farewell.

Meanwhile Alice seemed to have some kind of green decoration on her toenails? Not sure what that’s about.

Greg

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