Eight million carcasses just couldn't be wrong. Neither could the average daily rubbish collection of 7000 tonnes - most of it sitting, or floating, uncollected.
It was those two statistics from a news item on the BBC overseas service news which confirmed we'd made the right decision. Our family group of four were in Pattaya, 150 kilometres south east of Bangkok, when I saw it.
Pattaya was a substitute for Bangkok, where we were originally going for five nights for the start of our family holiday in early November.
Our timing was impeccable. Despite booking six months earlier when Malaysian Airways was offering a cheap return airfare from Auckland to Bangkok, we could hardly have chosen a worse time.
The week before our holiday was to start, Bangkok and Thailand were featuring nightly on the news, with graphic footage of ever-increasing flood levels.
Should we still go there? That was solved when, with six sleeps to go, the New Zealand Government issued a travel warning.
"Our advice is against all tourist and other non-essential travel to Bangkok. This does not apply to transit through Suvarnabhumi airport."
So that was that. Bangkok was out and Pattaya was in - even though it appeared the Thai Government was doing everything short of lining up thousands of peasants to form an absorbent human wall to keep the flood waters out of the CBD where the tourists go.
Flooding other parts of the capital deliberately to keep that part dry just didn't wash with us, so to speak.
Later in the trip we met other tourists, notably Australians, who'd been to Bangkok with "no worries", but it wasn't something we were comfortable doing.
Seeing the woman from the Thai relief agency on the news giving that unbelievable statistic - eight million dead animals, or carcasses, in the flood waters covering much of the country, gave us all the reassurance we needed that we'd made the right decision.
Our journey was in two parts. Five days in Pattaya, then six nights in Koh Samui, an island full of resorts.
Part A: Pattaya
It turned out this city of 100,000-plus was the original sin city of Thailand. Not a lot has changed really. It could be described as one giant girlie bar, where you could get drinks, girls, and a few variations of both.
Never was it a hard sell, though. In the interests of research for this travel story, our group, consisting of three Browns and a Scott (a mama and poppa bear, a daughter bear and her partner, the teddy bear) did the hard yards.
Unlike some Asian tourist spots, there isn't an evil undercurrent running through the city. Generally, it was all pretty laid back, in every sense of the word, although it took some of us a while to get over seeing fat, elderly European men (mainly German) walking hand-in-hand with tiny young Thai women. Or boys.
Mind you, it did mean the German culinary tastes were well catered for and most restaurants had German dishes on their menus.
That was fine with me, even if it did evoke the odd righteous comment from my travelling companions, along the lines of, "Nothing like going to Thailand to have a schnitzel for dinner".
They happily ate dishes such as pad thai, a traditional Thai dish comprising chilli, noodles (seafood, optional) chilli and even more chilli.
The shopping was great with absurdly cheap deals from the hundreds of roadside stalls that had bargains galore for the shopping-inclined.
The Pattaya hotels are more of the three- and four-star variety, with the odd luxury resort, but prices are cheap, with decent hotels ranging from NZ$50 to NZ$80 a night per person, with breakfast often included.
And the acid test for any holiday destination: Would I go back? Probably not. It was good, but once is enough.
Part B: Koh Samui
Koh, in Thai, means island, so after the city-style delights of Pattaya, we spent six nights in the island of Samui off the east coast of Kra Isthmusis, Thailand's second largest island, at 228 square kilometres and more than 50,000 people. We stayed at the Samui Resotel resort in Chaweng, the island's main beach and shopping centre.
It was wonderfully low key and, more importantly to us by this stage of the trip, quiet. Great beach at our doorstep and some delightful locals who had a ready laugh and desire to help visitors.
Compared with Phuket, where the only motivation for doing anything is price gouging and ripping off tourists, Samui was sheer bliss.
Prices, apart from the accommodation, were cheaper than Pattaya. We swam in the ocean which was like swimming in a pool - such was the warmth and the calm, or the hotel pool, complete with swim-up bar.
The food, for those chilli- inclined companions, was absurdly cheap and declared delicious. I enjoyed the Indian food, and there were plenty of Italian and German dishes to cater for more sensible tastes.
Daughter and teddy bear hired a motor bike, to push the number of those machines on the island past the one million mark, and easily did a tour of the island in a day, without incident and insurance.
Regulations and the attendant barriers to free trade that exist in the Western world are virtually unheard of in much of Thailand.
You want a bike, a car, a taxi, a girl, a boy, a room, a meal, a drink, then whoever you are talking to will happily rent you pretty much all of those things. Your only regulatory requirement is to have the required amount of money.
To sum up, if you want a relaxing, get-away-from-it island holiday, Samui is the place to go to. Forget Phuket and some of the other more high-profile destinations, Samui beats them.
Just don't fly Malaysian Air. Choose an airline that has crew who believe in radical service philosophies such as serving drinks, edible food and catering for the passengers, rather than ensuring they can sleep for the maximum amount of time.
Perils of travel
- If there's one thing that puts people off travelling to the northern hemisphere it is the amount of time it takes to get there.
- Nothing worse than arriving exhausted and taking days to get over it, just before it's time to fly home again.
- Times are all New Zealand time.
- Well, I'm happy to share this tip with travellers, that may make it easier - don't fly on Malaysian Airlines
- Our happy little group of four all agreed on one thing - it would take a fair bit before we trusted them again. Let me explain.
- WEDS: 1pm, we drive from New Plymouth to Auckland, have dinner with family members then drive to airport.
- WEDS: 10pm, arrive Auckland airport for 12.25pm departure, only to see the words, "rescheduled, now leaving 3.10am".
- THURS: 4.10am, we leave for Kuala Lumpur.
- THURS: 3pm, arrive in Kuala Lumpur, fortunately in time for connecting flight to Bangkok on another Malaysian airline flight. What was to be a six-hour stop is now two and a half hours.
- THURS: 5pm, approaching the designated boarding gate a security woman asks us where we are going. We say to gate 23 to catch the flight to Bangkok. "It's cancelled, not enough passengers," she tells us.
- THURS: 8pm, we catch the next Malaysian Airlines flight to Bangkok.
- THURS: 10.30pm, we finally arrive at Bangkok, after circling for 30 minutes.
- THURS: 11pm, pre-paid shuttle arrives to drive us to Pattaya, 150km from Bangkok on an excellent highway. Everything goes smoothly for an hour, then, along with what seems like every other car ever sold in Thailand, the police stop the traffic.
- Black limos are at the front, but the traffic is backed up for kilometres as we wait. Turns out it had something to do with the King, our driver tells us. After 35 minutes we're off again.
- FRI: 1.55am, we arrive at our hotel. The two rooms with queen- sized beds we booked aren't available, but they have two twin rooms. It figures.
