My plan in Thailand was a night train to Surat Thani, then a ferry to Koh Phangan where the resort would collect me at the docks, then return me there three days later to get the ferry back and take another overnight train to Bangkok and fly straight out to Hong Kong. It went perfectly!
I left Penang on the train at about 3pm, an hour behind schedule. In my row of seats was a pair of Polish friends, where the guy didn’t speak any English, and a Buddhist monk who shared buckets of fruit with the guy but maybe couldn’t touch/speak to women? We stopped at the Malay/Thai border for about an hour, long enough to be served dinner (good news! They took Malay ringgit so my failure to exchange money didn’t matter!) and eat it and have it cleared away. The (I think Thai?) girl in front of me had some kind of trouble with Thai immigration and ended up going away with an officer, after she was pointing out several stamps in her passport – no idea what was going on! Mine was pretty quick, no problems.
There wasn’t a huge difference in the countryside over the border, but the Thai side seemed poorer somehow, more shanty-like buildings. Lots of fields with little shelters in them, or houses standing alone. Fires burning in the backyard of a few places (campfires, not accidents) and one bonfire in the middle of a harvested-looking field.
There was an incredible looking sunset out the train window – it barely seemed worth trying to take photos of the sunset from a moving train with my phone, but here’s one anyway 😀
Just past Hat Yai I saw some kids playing soccer-volleyball, I’ve read about it but forget the name.
At ~7.30 the attendant went through and made all the beds so the Polish pair and I moved to the restaurant car to continue our iPad game of Cash Flow, which was an interesting concept with a strong element of luck. The beds were so cool, I am so happy I booked a sleeper car even though it was totally unnecessary for a trip ending at midnight.
The dining car closed at 9pm so the staff could all spread out bedrolls on the floor under the tables, didn’t look super comfortable!
I woke up about half an hour before my station, even before the alarm I’d set. An attendant came by but only about two minutes before we stopped so I wouldn’t want to rely on that for my waking and being ready to jump off! Surprisingly, there was a ticket window open at the station although it was almost 2am, so I bought my onward train right then – I picked the 8pm train but the woman said that one was slow and often late, so I should take the next one at 9pm, which turned out to be the one recommended on seat61 so good. The station was full of people including a ton of backpackers clearly waiting for another train, which made me feel good about my plan to hang out there for several hours in the evening on my way back.
Touts at the station asked where I was going, did I want a cheap hotel, and said ooh, Queen Hotel very bad, don’t go there, which I ignored and found Queen Hotel (which I’d prebooked online) unimpressive but completely adequate for my 7 hour stopover. In the morning I went and got some cash out and bought some shitty 7-11 style food, some hotdogs (labelled spicy but not) and a chicken dumpling roll. Then at about 8am I walked down to the station, where a guy at the front asked where I was going and pointed me towards a bus helpfully labelled Lompraya. A woman checked my ticket and I sat down and had some tea, with about three of us waiting. At 8.30 we loaded on the bus and suddenly another 30 people turned up, maybe from a well timed train? A funny set of backpackers, some of them scruffy in yoga pants, and as a strong contrast two guys who had spent either a lot of time or a lot of product to get their hair looking so ‘done’ that morning. I feel like all this travel has just made me more aware of how unadventurous I am, like the feeling of relief I get when a bunch of other tourists shows up and it’s like OK, this probably is where I meant to be and it’s probably quite safe. And we were off. I looked up some Thai phrases, decided I should aim to use thank you and the polite sentence ending (I noticed someone, maybe the lady I bought tea from, using -kah on the end of her English sentences).
We went past several temple sales places, like nurseries but just rows of miniature shrines/temples and at one of them also small ornamental pools. You could see these temples outside lots of houses and shops, seemed like there was usually one short one and one tall one.
The countryside was just so green. Things growing everywhere, brick fences almost hidden under vines, thick healthy looking grass, banana trees, palm trees…other trees :p We also passed a random cleared section of land with bright red dirt, and went past Surat Thani Palm Oil Research Center, owned by the ministry for agriculture (according to the big signs).
My feet were freezing on the bus, with air con on. I picked up a sore throat in Penang, and I blamed the air con – constantly going from heat into cold. I also wondered if the slightly moldy smell in my hostel might have been a sign of problems, or the hazy air blanketing the city for a couple days. Fortunately it seemed to be going away on its own pretty rapidly. Eventually we came to a big wide new turnoff towards the ferry – obviously a popular route!
I got an email while I was in the ferry saying my pickup would be a little late – I think they were pretty optimistic hoping that I’d see that, I hope they had a backup plan! So I met them at the 7-11 as requested, the ferry was late anyway so I was waiting less than five minutes. It was a friendly young man with limited English driving a literal pickup with the Bottle Beach logo on the door which was helpful. We drove around heading out of town and stopped at a random house where he dropped some computer parts off, then drove out of town, through another town, then through emptier and emptier territory until we turned into a dirt road/track that must be the source of the online complaints about the rough ride to get there – although it would have to be a much worse ride for anyone worth knowing to complain so I don’t know, maybe in busy season it gets torn up more.
Finally we turned into a village-looking area which is probably where the workers for the resort live, maybe for all three bottle beach resorts. We drove through that to the resort proper, which was straight up amazing. The weather was perfect, warm but not humid. The reception area was an open shelter, next to a gorgeous pool. After checking in (and handing over almost all the cash I had on me as a key deposit, lucky I went to the bank!) I was lead to a beautiful beach side bungalow made up with two beds – I can’t remember what I booked exactly but I wonder if I got upgraded because the place is so empty. There was an in-room safe so I figured I might as well out my passports in it so like an idiot I put them in, entered a code and closed it. Which, obviously enough in hindsight, locked them in with the last code someone had set. I had to go to the front desk and ask them to unlock it for me, feeling, again, like an idiot.
I was feeling mildly out of sorts with my sore throat and very tired, so sat around in the hammock on my verandah reading books for the afternoon, broken up with a short swim, washing some clothes in the sink (after which i realised that they will wash a whole load for me for $2, so probably i should just get them done properly!) a late lunch and finally dinner. The food prices are quite reasonable, which is a relief – although I think they’re fairly expensive for the area so lucky I didn’t have time to acclimatise to local costs! It turns out their internet went down in a storm last night and might be fixed in a couple of days, but it was so nice I didn’t even mind. A couple of days of sleep, swimming, spicy soups for my cold and massages is exactly what I needed – this is what I wished Tahiti would be like.
Anyway I read two books from the shared bookshelf and, appropriately enough, finished the Tahitian short stories, which just got more unacceptably Ian Fleming with each story until the final title story was a thinly disguised rant about how feminism (“invented by alcoholic dames and lesbians in the New York suburbs”, quote) is destroying the world and women these days are disgusting and need to fuck off out of the workplace already.
There appear to be about a dozen guests that I’ve seen, where the place could hold many times that number. Excellent! Among then was a couple who arrived just after I did, and asked how much the hotel pick up would have cost. Apparently they paid a taxi 1600 baht, instead of the 200 per person the hotel would have charged. Oops!
Tuesday: woke up a few times in the night hearing very heavy wind. At 6am it was raining so I went back to sleep, but at 9am it was just spitting and by the time I’d finished breakfast it was clear. I tried playing some iPad games and then did some programming interview questions on paper, including that stupid regex question that I’m determined to be able to do in my sleep now (ed: I never got that good at it. WTF parsers). At 1pm I had a massage booked, then I did some more reading and programming, checking my paper solutions in my shitty little iPad JavaScript environment because it was too much effort to pull out my laptop. It’s probably good practice for me to be typing in a notepad equivalent anyway, no auto completion or even a console to check how things are running :/ I did have a swim as well! At dinner I picked up a Dan Brown book because their library, while quite decent on first glance, was almost entirely in German when you looked closer. The most annoying books were the ones that still had an English title! And then I took some laundry to reception to be washed and that was the end of my busy day. They ask you to pay your tab each day, but their credit card processing is down along with the internet – hopefully it will be back up before I go but not sure? So I just signed acknowledgement of the charges I’d run up so far, about $30 for the two days.
Thursday
When I checked out, the credit card statement at the resort was still down with their internet, and I didn’t have enough cash in me – so we said I’d pay the tab when I got dropped at the pier, where there was an ATM. That worked smoothly and then I bought my ferry+bus ticket to Surat Thani train station, leaving me with a couple hours to kill. I left my bag in the ferry office and wandered around town a bit, looking at souvenir shops – also, a bookstore I picked up a couple books at 😉 You can tell how touristy the island is by all the restaurant signs saying they offer “Thai food”. I had some rice and pork before going to catch my ferry, although I was a little nervous about the waves. This time I was travelling on the car ferry, which being much larger than the passenger ferry I took last time, was a much smoother ride. Glad I decided I’d be OK eating before the trip! I arrived easily at the train station, found a seat and hung out reading a book among lots of others. There was some confusion about where the train carriages were lining up (and by confusion I mean opposite instructions from two different staff) but I made it into my carriage and found everyone heading to bed, at about 9pm again. I read for a while and facebooked excitedly before getting to sleep at a reasonable hour like midnight – unfortunately I discovered that everyone sleeps so early in the train because they’re all awake at 6am and the beds get put away again. I had about 80 baht left on me, bought a coffee from one of the outdoors who got on the train for 20 (barely worth it except for the novelty factor, a shit glass succeed serving of instant coffee and milk powder). We slooooowly pulled into Bangkok, the last few miles taking forever including random long stops to sit on the tracks – I can see why online advice is to get out at the first Bangkok station and catch the subway instead if you’re in a hurry! But I wasn’t, so I just enjoyed it. If I had been in a hurry for the airport I should have gotten off at the first Bangkok station (Bang Sue) which is actually closer to the airport, instead of staying on to loop south to Hua Lamphong. I used the time to check out other ways to get to the airport (bus 29). I think there was literally only myself and another backpacker left on for the last stop, smart locals all got off before we sat on the tracks for 20 minutes.
I could see a new rail line being built alongside this one as we entered Bangkok, and there was a brand new looking station we stopped at (don’t know what it was called). Then a touristy looking line of shops by the train tracks, cafes, a shop with a confederate flag in the window? Inside Bangkok the area along the train line looked pretty grimy – tiny little shops, racks of a few clothes for sale, a skip with rubbish bags piled for ten metres around it, the slimiest looking creek I’ve ever seen with houses backing onto it. Curiously enough graffiti seemed to be mostly in English.
We finally pulled in to Hua Lamphong station, a lovely old building. Jay had asked for some local coffee which made a good goal for my ~3 hour free time at the station before heading to the airport, I decided it was worth paying to store my bags for a bit so I could wander round properly. First I had to find my way out of the station, past the taxi touts to a street with lots of noodle places and so on, picked one for breakfast and it was just what I needed.
I decided to go to the Siam center, a shopping mall about half an hours walk away. First I took the MTR one stop just to try it, bought a ticket at the window and got a little black disc as my temporary card – neat! The tracks were blocked off from the platform with glass walls and there was a little sign saying “trains leave this station after being checked by security staff” (presumably because we were at the end of the line). As a train approached a security guy walked along saying something in Thai, then stopped between me and the other two white women with his hands out in a stop sign. When the doors opened and everyone was off, the other two tried to board anyway because super oblivious? A random guy near them said “wait one minute” in English. The train was super modern and smooth.
Off at the next station, I walked through Chulalangkorn university and found a market selling everything from snacks to clothes to puppies and kittens. Eventually I got to the mall, but the only place selling coffee beans was Starbucks and I decided against buying them :p It had taken me longer than I expected to walk, so I hailed a cab back to the station, picked up my left luggage and walked out just in time to see my bus to the airport pull up. I had read that taxi drivers didn’t want to go the airport, and it seemed to be true because all the guys yelling “taxi taxi” at me would ask where I was going and when I said Don Meung they would point over to the bus for me. Very helpful!
Traffic was pretty terrible, and it was only noon on a Friday. We sat completely still for five minutes at a time. It didn’t help that my phone had suddenly decided it didn’t have a sim card (bullshit, became an ongoing intermittent problem that I discovered could be fixed by turning off location services…wtf) so Google maps couldn’t tell me where I was at any point. It took us half an hour to get from Hua Lamphong to the Victory Monument, which I found worrying. Then I remembered that besides allowing an extra half hour for the bus, I had allowed an extra hour at the airport so I was probably going to be fine, so I relaxed to enjoy the scenery. We went past the Volunteer Defense Corps, whatever that is, then the Sam Sen philatelic museum, sounded fund! The last section of the trip on the arterial out of town went past the in progress train line and there was lots of graffiti on the concrete pillars, heavily featuring cute cartoon characters saying “no hope” or “hopeless” – a little odd…
The airport stop wasn’t obvious but a couple people on the bus made sure I got off at the right point, then I took a pedestrian bridge over the road into the airport. I had a shitty airport meal where they told me I could pay by card if I hit $x, then when I went to pay they said oh no, policy is minimum $2x for cards! I wasn’t about to spend twice as much on stuff I didn’t want so I waited for the Australian guy next to me to ask for his bill and asked him if I could pay it by card and he gave me cash, which worked fine. Then I was off onto the plane to Hong Kong to see Tracy!