Coppull family safely home from Thailand for Christmas (From Chorley Citizen)

Coppull family safely home from Thailand for Christmas

8:20am Tuesday 23rd December 2008 in

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A Coppull family is safely home for Christmas, after they faced a race against time to get out of Thailand during the recent troubles.

Colin Brooks, 46, and his wife Lynn, 47, had been enjoying a 17-day break in the Far East and were due to fly back to the UK from Bangkok when the city’s airport was seized by demonstrators from the People's Alliance for Democracy in protest against then-Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat.

After waiting at their hotel in the Thai capital for two days, the couple, of Tanyard Close, were forced to make a 900-mile trip overland to Kuala Lumpur in neighbouring Malaysia to get a flight back to England.

Colin, who works as AA recovery man, said: “The airport was seized on November 26 and we were due to fly back two days later. We had been travelling around Thailand a bit but had returned to Bangkok for a few days before the flight home.

“The first couple of days we didn’t mind because we just saw it as a couple of extra days around the pool. But after five or six days, we needed to get home.” It was then that the pair, who had met up with their daughter Rachel, 25, who is due to return home in the next couple of days after spending 12 months in Australia, faced the dash to Malaysia.

“We were told by Emirates, who were superb, that there was a flight home we could get but it was leaving from Kuala Lumpur just over 24 hours later.”

After a 12-hour bus journey to Phuket, they then faced another long trek by a minibus to Malaysia.

But they soon encountered difficulty with the tropical weather.

Colin said: “We had only been driving for a couple of hours when the rain started really coming down.

“The driver was getting nervous about the road flooding. Eventually he stopped the bus and told us that he couldn’t go any further.”

The couple were horrified to see the driver unloading their belongings and abandoning them.

“I argued with him and called a policeman over but in the end we were told to wait for another bus which never arrived,” said Colin.

“We managed to get a taxi to the border, walk through into Malaysia and then get another taxi to the airport.”

Colin and Lynn, who is the assistant manager at Johnsons in Chorley, made it with minutes to spare.

Despite the experience, Colin says it has not put him off returning to Thailand in the future.

“It was very tiring because we left our beds in the hotel at 10am on the Sunday and didn’t climb into our beds at home until 7pm on the Tuesday.

“But it certainly wouldn’t put us off going back there,” he said.

Their son Daniel, 27, who was also in Thailand with friends, was forced to stay in Phuket for more than a week before he could return home.

Now they are all looking forward to real family Christmas at home.