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Published: September 22nd 2011
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After a sleepless night of scuttling, rustling and chittering, we paid our bill at Lampam with bad grace and headed back over the wooden bridge of doom to a 'bus stop' which was in fact a desolate piece of road masquerading as a pick up point for the half hourly (as if!) bus back into Phattalung.
As the rain poured, the gods of mercy shone down on us when a knight in a shining Toyota stopped to see if we wanted a lift. After many conversations over the phone with his daughter (who could speak english) he dropped us off at a table - also by the roadside, in the rain. Although it seemed like a bad joke, this was actually a bus station and the very bored woman at the desk sold us a ticket to Trang and escape!
Half an hour later, the bus arrived and whisked us away to freedom, beaches, palm trees and pina coladas or, rather more accurately, Trang bus station where we were on the whole ignored, apart from by a couple of old men who stared at the piece of paper with the hotel address written on it, occasionally offering us a
"ooooooooh" or "nooooooo" until someone read out loud one part of the address "Sikao Trang" which was greeted with a chorus of "Sikao Trang??!" back as if we'd been deliberately keeping vital information from them. We were promptly bundled into the back of a tuk-tuk (still in the rain) and driven at breakneck speed to......another table and group of seats in the rain. All good stuff though as they seemed to know where we wanted to go and a few minutes later piled us into a minibus with about 75 other people and took us on the 40 minute journey to our hotel.
We were dropped off by the beach, almost certainly - there was sea and everything. As we wandered around the ghost town of the resort, we did have a fleeting moment of wondering whether everything was closed as it looked as though Hurricane Barbie or whatever was about to kick off. After a few false starts, we found our way to the main entrance and knocked up the startled skeleton staff who had settled into the office for an afternoon of daytime soaps.
The room was fine - big enough to hang some washing up
in which seems to be part of oddly important criteria these days.
Dinner was in a giant restaurant which, in sunny weather, would offer staggeringly beautiful views out onto the ocean with it's breathtaking limestone cliffs straight ahead. Unfortunately, the gale blowing through the restaurant was reminiscent of the end of 'Carry On Up The Khyber'. We sat there, talking about the infinite variety of the thai menu and drank beer as the plastic sheeting at the windows crashed up and down, tablecloths lifted and the building rattled. Not an eyebrow was raised as lights flickered and large pieces of palm tree flew across our line of sight.
Unfortunately, the infinite variety of the thai menu was a little too much for Ed's stomach to bear and he deeply regretted having such a hot green curry with figs in that night....
We soon settled into a routine of washing, buying crisps and cheap beer from the sour lady at the corner shop, checking for mosquito bites, killing mosquitos, spraying ourselves with mosquito spray, killing mosquitos, having a walk to the end of the short pier and back, killing mosquitos, writing postcards, playing with the skinny cat, killing mosquitos. Hard to say whether the low point was realising we'd both been bitten on the face - ON THE FACE!!! or waking up one morning and Ed counting 12 bites just on my forearm. Still, he wasn't in a position to laugh as his feet looked like something John Merrick would have felt familiar with. It was nicely summed up one morning when he was still lying in bed curled up under the sheets and I asked how he felt - "small and itchy" was the reply.
Overall though, it was good to stop and take stock for a few days and, when a couple of days later, when the rain stopped lashing down, the beach did look wonderful and the islands very alluring. We made the mistake of looking too closely at the sand on the beach though and yet again realised that there are no Blue Flag Awards in Thailand. The beach was strewn with years of rubbish and filth and you seriously wouldn't set foot in the water. This had given us a bit of a hankering for something more 'beachy' and after consulting the worst guide book in the world, we decided that Krabi sounded funny and probably had tourists and therefore restaurants where the staff didn't bugger off to the full moon party without telling you, leaving only days old fried rice to eat.
Krabi it was then - now how best to book a hotel this time?....
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