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Published: November 9th 2007
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Goodbye to Khao San Road
It was highly emotional to wave goodbye to all the honest sales people. It was a 5am start and we jumped into a quick taxi and before we knew what had happened we were sitting on the plane to Bangkok. Emma was a bit concerned about getting the DVDs through customs after the fiasco in trying to send them home and was a bit nervous as we approached the scanners. I reminded her about the plight of terrorists and the panic they have to go through when they get on a plane and through the scanners, only to die at the end of it. She never actually said anything to this, but I think deep down it made her feel a bit better.
We got through without a hitch anyway. We made sure that we had very little Dong in our pocket as nobody would exchange it outside of Vietnam, and what was left we spent in the airport, mostly on Milka chocolate and Toblerone. Goodbye Vietnam! As I left, I felt a tinge of regret of not being able to go through Laos and do the famous "river tubing" to get back to Bangkok, but time was against us.
On arrival in Bangkok, we rushed to get to customs and were
Emma and her travel pillow
Trying to hide her worries about bus thefts. amazed at the lack of queues, compared to what we were faced with the last time we arrived at the airport. We collected our bags and said our goodbyes to Mary and Brid as they were going to catch a flight to Chiang Mai.
As it was earlier in the day, the bus into the city didn't take as long (around a third of the time that it took on our first touchdown) and we even managed to get a room at Lamphu House. We had a few things that we wanted to do in Bangkok before we left for the islands the next day. The most important of which was sorting out our photos on our USB flash drives and cameras as they were all now quite badly infected by a virus from using them in too many dodgy internet cafes. It was tricky to remove too as it turned all of our folders into exe files, so accessing our photos was a tedious memory game in trying to recall file paths after a Vietnamese virus checker quarantined it all. I ended up just chucking all the pictures onto DVD and reformatting and we can now use it without the worry of losing all our pictures...for now. It took a lot longer than we thought it would though.
We also had to get our ticket to the island sorted. We decided to head to Koh Phangan first of all as it was the most northern island we were looking to go to on the Gulf of Thailand, so it seemed to make sense. However, all the Bangkok travel agents were informing us of torrential rain on Koh Tao, Koh Phangan and Koh Samui over the past few weeks so we were a bit disappointed. However, we were having to go that way anyway to get down to Singapore so we didn't really have much to lose.
We took a walk down Khao San Road to get something to eat before heading back to Lamphu House for some much needed sleep. Forgetting that it was Halloween, we were faced with hundreds of both Thais and tourists dressed in many costumes enjoying the celebrations. We weren't tempted to join them alhough we promised ourselves a farewell drink in Gullivers Tavern before we left the next day.
Still having some admin to do with the flash drives and DVD, the next day we checked out early and dumped our bags in the hostel. The bus was at 6pm and was an overnight bus and boat combination to get us to Koh Phangan at around 11am the next day. After posting stuff off, finishing off on the computers and buying travel pillows (yay!), we found we had a couple of hours to kill so we were about to head to Gullivers until...
"What the hell are you doing here?!?"
Tony had come into the internet cafe sporting some new ear piercings and a fresh tan. Tony, as well as his girlfriend Sue, were two friends we had made on our previous stay in Bangkok but were doing our excursion the other way around, which meant they should have been going to Cambodia right about now. It turns out they had changed their plans completely though and were now heading to New Zealand for a couple of weeks before moving back to Ireland. After exchanging stories, we ended up just heading to "Oh My Cod!", a British cafe across the road as we were running short of time.
One disturbing story which came out was Tony & Sue's journey down to Koh Phangan from Bangkok, the exact same one we were about to embark on. They had both fallen asleep on the bus and upon leaving to catch the boat, they noticed all their money had been stolen as well as their Visa cards, from which a fair debt had been amassed. Not only that, but half of their bus had been fleeced. We had read of similar scams in the Lonely Planet but we just thought it was all precautions. We started to become a bit concerned and adopted tight security measures.
Getting on the bus, we were still apprehensive, but as time went on we relaxed a little as there wasn't the huge number of "staff" on that had been on Tony & Sue's bus, who they suspected of the thefts. The bus itself was luxurious, particularly in comparison to the Vietnam ones. The legroom was spacious, the head rests soft, the recline on the seats generous and most importantly, our travel pillows worked a charm. We slept a fair bit and it didn't seem long until we heard "LAST STOP!!" being shouted and left the bus with all our possessions intact.
This was about 5am. We were to wait on the boat for another 4 hours on benches beside the pier and being bitten with gusto by swarms of mosquitos. Throughout our travels, we had been averaging about 2-3 bites every few days, but they really went to town on us this time. They even penetrated the thick skin on my palm. Emma did not get bitten as bad as she ensured that she covered ever bit of her skin as we waited for the boat. She was even sporting the socks with sandals fashion. The boat ride to Koh Phangan was boring as we ended up trying to get some sleep in the downstairs compartment, only to find it a little too chilly. We headed up on the deck as we approached the island, however much to our dismay, there were dark rain clouds looming ominously over the island...
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