THERE were two realities in Bangkok the week we were there.
One was of a city under siege as protesters shut down Thailand's main airports. This was what you saw on television and in the newspapers.
The other was what we experienced, an absolutely normal, vibrant Bangkok plumping unashamedly for the tourist dollar.
Everywhere we went, Thais we met apologised for the 'inconvenience' to tourists but assured us that Bangkok was safe to savour or discover.
After we worshipped at the shrine of Brahman, a principal Hindu god whom the Thais refer to as the four-faced Buddha, a well-coiffed, middle-aged Thai woman approached us and suggested where we should shop, dine and visit for a genuine Thai experience.
She offered her advice after finding out that we had so far confined ourselves to malls near our hotel, like Siam Paragon and Central World, which she dismissed as shopping clones of Singapore and Hong Kong.
But what about trouble at other, more genuine Thai places of interest, we asked. No trouble, she said.
So while the rest of the world saw a Bangkok hurtling towards paralysis and violence, visitors like us found that life went on as usual, and we were free to enjoy happy shopping and spicy dining.
So, when my mother-in-law called - driven to extreme anxiety after watching CNN's latest instalment of what should have been dubbed Bangkok Dangerous - we could honestly say that we felt very safe, because we were.
The city's malls and shops opened on time and stayed open late as shoppers waded into the heightened commercialism of an upcoming Christmas.
In the evenings, there were concerts and car shows in the park. The transvestites were out in force, impossible to miss in their siren red mini-skirts and competing hard against real women in the rows of shophouses on both sides of the street fronting our five-star hotel.
The ridiculously addictive Som Luan night bazaar was populated with tourists and Thais, ubiquitous Vespa-powered trishaws or tuk-tuks, and taxis. Its enormous beer garden was a full house of revellers, foreign and local.
Bangkok's state-of-the-art cinemas were briskly patronised as my teenage kids dragged me to see Twilight, the latest chick flick disguised charmingly as a vampire movie.
Then the mood turned, late last Friday, when it looked like the mob occupation of the airports might go on indefinitely, and after the Thai Prime Minister had relocated to northern Chiang Mai.
Suddenly, there appeared the threat of a city having to house and feed hundreds of thousands of stranded visitors indefinitely. If that was not easy for the Thai authorities, it was far worse for the visitors.
The Thais offered free rooms and food for stranded travellers, but only four hotels were designated initially.
That forced a mad scramble and cross-town migration by thousands for a limited number of rooms.
Fortunately, my Singapore travel agency pestered its Thai partner via e-mail and telephone to find us government-subsidised accommodation. And a thoughtful front office manager at the Imperial Queens Park hotel gave us connected rooms.
Others, especially in family-sized groups like ours or larger, were not as fortunate. Some families with young children were assigned separate rooms on different floors or even rooms in different hotels.
The difficulty of finding flights out made it all the worse.
Airlines were caught off-guard by the airport shutdown. Designated check-in sites were flooded by visitors, embassy minders and Thai immigration and customs officials, but had no airline staff for hours.
So the harrowing hunt for hotel rooms was replicated in the scramble for airline seats as passengers trekked, many with luggage and papers, from check-in counter to check-in counter, uncertain whether, after hours of waiting and queuing, they could trade or buy seats.
Through the Singapore Embassy, we secured seats on Singapore Airlines on the third day of trying, after our Thai Airways flight was rendered non-existent.
That meant spending some $3,000 more, or two-thirds the price of our holiday package, for fresh one-way tickets, transport to the airport and ancillary costs for staying three nights longer.
But, again, we were luckier than most that our embassy found us seats on SIA.
The worst part of being a visitor in Thailand was the opening of an inadequate airport as an escape hatch for travellers.
This was U-Tapao airport in a naval base some 140km from Bangkok. When it was opened last Saturday, the crush to check out made it nothing less than every traveller's worst nightmare.
A Singaporean friend I met on Monday described how he and his group of nine - including his 80-year-old mother - were almost trampled upon the first time they tried to leave last Saturday.
'It was the first time I feared for my life,' he recalled.
He said he had to shout and punch his way out after the crowd shoved him through the only door leading to the sole X-ray scanning machine and final check-out to the aircraft.
'Imagine thousands of people trying to get through one tiny door,' he said.
His group missed their flight.
An officer with the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had despatched a three-member team to U-Tapao, helped his group get cabs back to Bangkok, where they had to struggle to find rooms for nine people.
My friend felt that the Singapore Government could have done more to help stranded Singaporeans.
The Singapore Embassy's deputy chief of mission, Ms Teo Lay Cheng, said that its phones did not stop ringing especially as the airport closures dragged on.
'We fielded about 1,000 calls a day,' she said. The embassy contacted every Singaporean who called to provide updates and offer advice, and tracked down those who had e-registered with the ministry.
Singapore Airport Terminal Services (Sats) staff who arrived at U-Tapao confirmed my friend's description of the chaos.
According to a Sats employee, some passengers collapsed from the heat and exhaustion while others on a shoestring holiday slept by the roadside because they did not have money to go back to Bangkok and return to try for seats again.
By the time we arrived at U-Tapao on Monday, conditions were still harsh and especially unforgiving on children, the elderly and those with a lot of luggage to lug from the carpark to the terminal.
But SIA had secured its own check-in area by then, swept for security by Sats officers, making us feel that we were in an island of calm surrounded by stifling confusion.
Naturally, there are questions, such as why the Singapore Government did not charter special flights for Singaporeans, as other governments did for their people.
Or why SIA did not offer priority seating to Singaporeans, regardless of whether they had booked originally with the airline.
And, at which point in a crisis abroad will the Singapore Government and SIA work in tandem to get Singaporeans out as quickly as possible?
For the moment, after our first family holiday by air, we were relieved to get out safe.
And we are grateful for the help we received from the embassy (thanks Ms Teo), the government team at U-Tapao (ditto Messrs Joey Lim and Chee Eng Thiam) and a national airline (thanks Ms Helen Ho) which offered a familiar blanket of efficiency, comfort and security when we needed it.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on Dec 4, 2008.
