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Hat Kuat - Bottle Beach
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Another long day of travel was ahead of me. We left the island at 9am in the morning and made it to the Thai border around 11:30, but that was only a small part of the trip to Koh Pha Ngan. There were no sleeper births or 2nd class seats left on the 10 hour train ride from Sungai Kolok to Surat Thani so we had to settle for a 3rd class seat. The first 4 hours weren't so bad because it was just the 3 girls that I left the island with and me in our seats, but after they got off in Hat Yai it was just random people and standing room only folks crashing a spot. I decide that the dining car would be more fun and headed up there with a bottle of Scotch to meet some locals. I spent the next 6 hours draining a bottle of cheap scotch and a few beers with these guys.
Before I knew it, I was in Surat Thani. The taxi drivers in ST are just the worst ripoff artists in all of Thailand. They have signs posted with prices of 1000B to take you 12Km to the pier. I was able to negotiate it down to 300B, but that was still just ridiculous, so I ended up taking a motorcycle taxi for 120B. I took the overnight ferry to Koh Pha Ngan still not sure if I was going to go to Had Rin Beach or not. I met a couple Swedish girls on the boat that were going there, but when I arrived, I just couldn't do it and took a taxi up to Chaloklam Bay to get a boat to Bottle Beach. Unfortunately, it was still before 7am and there were no longtails or other people going to BB. If I wanted to charter a boat by myself it was going to be 500B. The delivery boat driver said he'd leave at 8am, but after waiting 2 hours for him I just walked off and ended up in a dive shop watching the F1 race in Melbourne. I mean I understand Thai Time, but this guy was clearly on Cuban Time of the Isis variety. I finally got a bungalow right on the beach around 2pm, 29 hours after I left Kecil. I promptly kicked off my Tevas and dove into the ocean for a well deserved swim. Two weeks later I almost left my Tevas in the corner of the room where I hadn't seen them since I arrived.
It was great to finally be back on my favorite island in the world after 14 years. I set up my hammock and all the things I needed within arms reach and did little else for the next 10 days.
I did get up from my hammock and go over to Uran's dual hammocks to play some Hammockgammon, backgammon while sitting in hammocks. We had some marathon matches where many games were decided by less than 5 points and 1 game by 1 point.
Bottle Beach is an interesting fairly remote part of Pha Ngan. Down on the Smile side of the beach, there are expat residents that live there up to 10 months of the year. On the Dark Side, our side, people seem to come back year after year and stay for a few months. There is very little mingling between the two sides except for the common ground in the middle where people get together to watch the latest bootlegged movies on a big screen TV, many of which are still playing in the theaters in the States. You can tell because every once in awhile someone gets up and walks in front of the camera filming the movie at the theater. Of course, I had to cross those barriers and see how the other side lives. One night I was sitting in the Smile Restaurant by myself reading the paper and expat Alan comes over to say hello. After a few words, he goes back to the expat community and sparks up a J. I look over at him and ask, "so were you just checking to see if I was an undercover cop?". Of course, he denied it, but I'm pretty sure that was what he was doing. It was weird because just the night before a Chilean guy was convinced that I was a cop and didn't want to light up in front of me. I just told him, "Mire, mi Ingles es tan bueno ser un policia Thailandes y mi Espanol tan bueno ser un local. No soy la policia, cabron! Oh, how Pha Ngan has changed from a free form laissez faire attitude to the watch your back and look out for the Man mentality. But after 14 years, I was very happy to still be able to find a chill spot on my once favorite island.
The highlight of the 2 weeks here was a trip that Alan organized to Ang Thong National Marine Park.
We saw some beautiful deserted islands and some of the best snorkeling in all of Thailand. Visibility was at least 25M with warm water conditions. Unfortunately, the trip was more than I expected with the 400B park fees and I was out of money and had to leave. For the past 2 weeks, I had been ignoring the fact that my ATM card had gotten eaten while I was in Surat Thani and now I had to use my backup ATM card from US Bank that charged me 370B($11) to make a withdrawal in Baht (highway robbery, this should be illegal). The ATM said that my primary account had been suspended and I had no idea why. I asked my friend to try to book a flight with an unrelated credit card and she wasn't able to do that either, so I was praying that I didn't have a catastrophic failure across all my financial institutions. I've been carrying multiple backups on this trip for over a year and this was the first time I've had any trouble. I was down to 500B and I had to get all the way back to Bangkok to sort out this mess. Just my luck, when I got to an ATM, it was out of order. A Dutch guy overheard my woes and gave me 500B to make sure I could get home. That helped out a lot because even if I couldn't get any more money out, that 500B would have let me get all the way home. But it turned out it was just some mix up and nothing was wrong at all. Whew!
* Travelers Note - DTAC has little to no signal on Bottle Beach. If you want to use your mobile, get a 12Call SIM.
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