excess baggage nightmare

So, off we headed with camcorder in hand, wistfully recreating the closing scenes of Muriel's Wedding as we span past familiar surroundings shouting 'goodbye sunny harlesden' and 'farewell lovely acton'. The only dampener at this point was the dour taxi man who grumbled about the fact that we had seven suitcases scattered around his cab.

We arrived at Heathrow around 3 hours before our flight and immediately joined the check in queue, hoping to get a good seat by arriving so early. Annabel mentioned something about the number of bags we had so i nudged her out to the check in desk and told her to smile sweetly to get the bags past the rather stern looking bespectacled chap on duty. “Say we're getting married and smile, it'll be fine” were my cagy words of encouragement. 

No way, he said, 95 kilos with an allowance of 40 kilos. At 9 quid per kilo and a special allowance of 55 kilos (thanks so much) that would be an excess baggage charge of £360! Our hearts sank. Annabel looked tearful whilst i fought to contain my anger. After a bit of shouting and screaming he said he would make it 65 kilos but we would have to lose 30 kilos. He recommended the Excess Baggage Co so off we went with all 7 suitcases to get rid of 30 kilos.

We were not the only ones in this predicament. A sweating African gentlemen and an American businessman were both sifting through their stuff, weighing their bags regularly and swearing under their breath. I joined them, already swearing. We sent one suitcase to Auckland from London at a cost of just under £170, not quite as bad as the £360 but still a bit of a hit. Annabel was bursting out into tears albeit sporadically, with less than 1 hour till flight time.

When we came back to check in, our check in guy had dissapeared and we were left with another stern looking one, this time a middle aged lady who you just knew wasn't about to take any shit, not even from a pleading engaged couple off on their big adventure. 81 kilos, but.. erm.. that's not possible. “That's what the scales say sir”. I showed her the receipt from the last assistant and the receipt from Excess Baggage Co. She said the figures didn't add up as 95 - 30 = 65, but we still had 81 kilos. I agreed and asked her what she thought we should do.She suggested we go back down and send some more. I politely informed her that we would not be doing this and could she fetch the person we had been dealing with before. She looked on the system but said his details weren't logged.

I launched into a tirade about global terrorism and how i had to be subjected to being photgraphed and recorded etc, yet they had no record of the check in clerk that had just served us, blah blah blah. I was onto a winner on this one, completely forgetting that i was trying to get on a plane for a few minutes. She cracked and got over the duty manager. I calmed down enough to explain the situation and she immediately waived all the charges and we got through with 81 kilos, 25 mins till takeoff.

Great we thought, although we had another two airports to get through and would have to lose even more stuff in Bangkok. We ran to the departure gate and puffed onto the plane for the first leg of our adventure.

Next.. a couple of days in bangkok