A few days after coming back from the Philippines, I was once again on the move. Now my travels have taken me to another nearby country – Thailand. I took a late Tiger Airways flight from Singapore to Bangkok hoping to catch another flight out the next day. It would be my first time in Bangkok since almost six years ago. No longer will I be landing at the Don Mueang International Airport but I will be landing at the brand new and controversial Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok.
Bangkok has turned into some sort of hub for foreign travellers and there are flights going from Bangkok to every imaginable city I could think of. Suvarnabhumi International Airport is located in a massive plot of land in the outskirts of Bangkok, keep in mind that Bangkok it already a massive city. Just before landing we noticed a huge fire near the airport and immediately we started to smell the smoke inside the aircraft and I started to feel nauseous. Fortunately, we were already taxiing towards the terminal.
The terminal building itself is expectedly massive, and it brings comparisons to Hong Kong International Airport to mind in terms of sheer size and cutting edge design. However, these comparisons start to disappear once you continue inside the terminal building. You can see airport staff just loitering around apparently not doing anything. The terminal also seems a little cramped however massive it already is. Anyway, I got through immigration fairly quickly and started exploring the rest of the terminal.
As expected, the rest of the terminal was similarly massive. There are dedicated floors for departure and arrival and it seems that you cannot just go between these floors that easily. Long escalators transport visitors from one part of the terminal to another. Sometimes the escalators flatten out and some part travel on an incline. I was the first time I would ride on such escalators, I would love to know why the escalators were designed that way.
One thing that made the Suvarnabhumi International Airport different was the fact that it felt so crowded. It seems like you will always keep bumping into people here. This is vastly different from the Hong Kong International Airport or even Singapore’s Changi International Airport. It would seem that as big the airport already is, it still is not big enough!
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