Bus to Bangkok
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2008
1
66
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Bangkok,
Thailand
Monday, November 24, 2008
We booked a speedboat back to the mainland, Unfortunately there was no slow boat from Koh Mak so Annie had to endure the same again.
There were far less people on this boat, maybe only eight of us. This clearly made the boat much lighter. The driver clearly enjoyed driving at speed, and we passed another similar boat half way. We were going much faster. The jumping of the boat on the crest of each wave, and its crashing back down on the sea hadn't been a big problem before. But this guy was fast. When we jumped of the end of a wave the boat rocked a little, leaning over to the left or right side before landing. This was a bit worrying. On a few occasions we land anged to one side and the engines cut out. Ordinarily I would probably have felt sea sick but, fortunately or unfortunately, I was distracted by the copious soiling that had occurred in my undergarments.
The driver slowed down for the second half of the trip, maybe even he was feeling a little uneasy. On our arrival back on the mainland we caught a bus almost immediately to Bangkok. Five hours later we were there.
On our arrival to Bangkok we had quite a bit of difficulty getting a cab; there were plenty around but none would take us where we wanted to go. This was a bit of a mystery to us. We eventually got one.
When we arrived in the area of our hotel the cabbie had to drop us off a few hundred metres early as the road in front had been blocked off with a wall of car tyres, about three deep and six or seven high. There were security guards at the side of the wall who let us pass without any question. We walked through a large roundabout that had been entirely shut off, past a demonstration of some sort, and up a large dual carriageway. Twenty minutes later we were at the hotel.
We asked at the hotel and were told that we'd passed an anti-government protest. We looked at the foreign office website; it recommended avoiding several areas of Bangkok. As it turned out, these areas were the roundabout and dual carriageway we'd just walked down.
Kyle and Stephanie were in Bangkok, but just about to leave. We met with them for literally five minutes before they had to go for their bus. They told us that during the three hour bus ride they'd taken to get to Bangkok the bus had managed to collect four punctures. Seems we may have given them our curse.
