We arrived here late at night on 25th April and headed straight for our pre-booked hotel which fortunately was excellent, and a short-ish walk from the Thai Airways office which we were to visit with depressing frequency for the next couple of days. Just as we left India we got news from our travel Agent that we had more flight problems. As we are changing our itinery and going to Nepal in June now, it means our flights, booked with Thai Airways will now need to be in a different sequence and you aren't allowed to do this. We had no idea about this obviously and we were pretty hacked off. We thought of possibly reverting to our original 4th May Nepal/Tibet trip as things have now improved in Nepal but that was a non-starter as GAP cancelled the trip anyway. Thanks for that Gap Travel. They never gave us the option to cancel and get our money back, they simply waited for us to postpone, then cancelled making sure they kept our money. Thai Airways, after much too-ing and fro-ing with their Auckland office eventually let us change our flight sequence and dates but not before we paid them an extra NZ$200 (just under 80 quid). Therefore this Nepal business has left us over 700 quid out of pocket in extra flights with no chance of getting it back through the insurance. We were pretty pissed off to put it mildly and it wasn't the easiest business to sort out trying to contact three different offices in opposite parts of the world (Gap in Canada, Thai Airways and our travel agent in Auckland plus Thai Airways here in Bangkok) with the respective time zones. This has meant we're cutting our trip short by nearly 4 weeks to make the money up. It's not a disaster time wise as we will still have plenty of time to do all we want too but 700 quid is a lot of money by anyones standards. We've been totally shafted by three different companies, Imaginative Traveller (our north India tour company), GAP travel (running our Nepal/Tibet trip) and Thai Airways and it's so frustrating that these companies just hide behind the small print all the time and couldn't give a damn about their customers once they get their money. The real villian here though is the King of Nepal. He truly is a power crazed, dictotorial, incompetent monarch and good on any Republican movement in Nepal we say! Whats galling is that a simple announcement to restore Parliament and democracy which was made after our trips were cancelled, restored order in the country. Great timing King, thanks a bundle for that one. The Nepal situation couldn't have been predicted by anyone, least of all ourselves and our only real mistake was having an Indian visa which ran out on the day we were suppose to leave on our North India to Nepal trip. That put us in the position where we had to get out of India before our revised trip there was due to end. What is disheartening, is every decision we seem to make seems to end up costing us money recently. C'est la vie, you live and learn and we're determined not to let it ruin the rest of our trip and at least we will get to see Nepal and Tibet in June, which didn't look likely at one stage. With all this to sort out we didn't have much inclination too see Bangkok and Stuart has already seen a fair bit of it anyway. It was a pleasant change to stay in 1st world conditions and even walking into a lovely air conditioned shopping mall was bliss compared to what we got use to in India. As anyone who has visited Bangkok will know, there is considerable poverty and pollution here and it's uncomfortably hot and humid but it felt like luxury for us. We spent 2 full days and three nights here before catching a bus, early on the 28th bound south for the Island of Koh Chang.