I recently had a two-week vacation in Thailand, so I’m going to do a few posts about that trip. My friend Nai and I spent some time at Patong Beach in Phuket, a few nights in Bangkok and a few more days in Nongkhai. This first part will be about two airports where I had a chance to take some videos. You can see the video I made at the end of this post.
The first airport was Udon Thani Airport. Udon is a city of about 400,000 people, so it’s not exceptionally large and doesn’t have a huge airport. The inside of the airport, like the departure area and the boarding gates, is clean, modern and comfortable, but it doesn’t have that many food and beverage options. Nai and I spent the night in Nongkhai, which is right across the border from Laos. Because we had an early flight from Udon to Bangkok, we took an early (6:30 a.m.) taxi to Udon, which costs 800 Thai baht, if memory serves me correctly.
From Udon Thani, we flew into Bangkok’s Don Meuang International Airport, which serves mainly as a domestic flight center. It used to be the only international airport in Bangkok, but with the opening of Suvarnabhumi Airport in 2006, it was relegated to a secondary role. This airport used to be in terrible shape, but with an upgrade, the interior is now very attractive, and, in a lot of ways, I think it has a much nicer ambience than Suvarnabhumi, though I haven’t been to the big airport since 2019.
One complaint I have about Don Meuang is that upon arrival, it seems that debarking passengers always have to take a shuttle bus to get to the arrivals area and the bus takes around seven minutes (I timed it) to travel from the plane to the terminal. Perhaps a minor hassle, but I like to step off a plane directly into the terminal.
So, here’s the video of the two airports. I’ll continue with my trip report in the next post, soon I hope.