We soon learned that local travel in Thailand is kind of like being kidnapped. You have very little idea where you are, where you are going or when you are going to get there, and are totally dependent on your captors, who seem to view you as a kind of self-loading freight that's best to be ignored as far as possible.
The mini bus driver arrived at 0615, and insisted we leave our untouched breakfast to depart post-haste. Half an hour later we were dropped at a different travel agent office in Na Thon - the main port in Ko Samui – where we were issued with completely new tickets and told to wait for 45 minutes. We wolfed down a second breakfast at a dockside greasy spoon before being hustled onto a coach which drove us to a completely different town to board a ferry. Funnily enough, the ferry was a 2nd hand Japanese ship complete with automatic toilets, original signage, and, I think, carpet which carried us over to Don Sak on mainland Thailand.
We reboarded the coach on the mainland only to be kicked off after about an hour with four other foreigners, in the middle of nowhere at a little shack by a highway. A guy wearing a T-shirt and shorts wandered out, half-heartedly tried to take our tickets then sat back down to watch TV. When we asked him why we had been dropped of there, he told us we had to wait an hour for another bus. We waited an hour. Then the same guy got up from his table and told us all to load our stuff onto his tuk tuk (which had been parked outside the whole time). He drove us 10 minutes to another travel agent in the town of Suratthani. The 3rd travel agent issued us with another set of tickets, and told us to sit tight as she had to make a phone call. A couple of minutes later a young guy appeared who picked up our bags and piled Sarah and me into his Mercedes.
The Mercedes drove two blocks to a 4th travel agent, who didn't even look at our tickets, or us. When pressed he admitted that yes, they were going to Penang 'in 10 minutes'. After half an hour we were piled into a mini-bus along with 8 other passengers, to find the windows wired shut and the aircon switched off. The driver then left us in the car with 8 other passengers for 20 minutes whilst he finished his paperwork.
When we eventually got going, the minibus drove at the 300km stretch to Hat Yai just north of the Malaysian border. En route, we occasionally screeched to a halt to let people off or on, or for people to drop off or pick up mysterious small packages in plastic bags from random roadside colleagues.
In Hat Yai we stopped at our 5th travel agent office, where we had to wait another '10 minutes' for our bus. An hour later in torrential rain we piled into our last minibus, thankfully with aircon, and crawled through heavy traffic for another 2 hours to the border.
As we drove out of Hat Yai the driver informed us that he needed an extra 50 baht from everyone otherwise 'border crossing will be very slow'. Western indignation gave way to pragmatic resignation when we remembered that 50 baht is about 50p. This 'overtime charge' was eventually paid to the border police in a blank envelope.
The border process was none the nicer for this palm-greasing, but then I guess border police aren't often the cheeriest of characters. Thai border police were a fraction nicer than their U.S. counterparts – their default attitude towards civilians seemed to be one of subdued loathing rather than the outright hostility of many U.S. passport stampers. Ironically, the Thailand Tourism Authority's current campaign tag-line is 'Thailand: The Land Of Smiles'.
In contrast, when we crossed no-mans land to the Malaysian border our reception couldn't have been friendlier. The staff were laughing and joking as they checked our passports, and when they x-rayed our bags the attendant let us come round and look them on his screen.
Dirt roads and petrol stalls farewell! We were now speeding down pristine Malaysian motorway past shiny Petronas petrol stations on the final 2 hour stretch to Pulau Penang. Looking west across to the island, we saw skyscrapers and brightly-lit billboards casting reflections on the sea. 17 hours after leaving Ko Samui, we had arrived.
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