Boats, Trains and Squid on a stick

---

Goodbye Kho Tao
I completed my final two dives, both on new sites, before grabbing a spicy papaya salad for lunch. It was from the grimiest stall ever, but the lady working it was friendly, so I thought what the hell. Nothing like diahorrea to help a long journey... although thankfully this was not the case. I said goodbye to Kho Tao, and borded the ferry to the promised land. Well, the mainland at least.

Thai Sleeper Trains
I slept for most of the journey from Kho Tao to Chumporn in spite of the freezing aircon and the hard plastic seats. The smell of drying (and perhaps rotting) fish roused me to semi consciousness - Chumporn is literally rammed with fishing boats. I had several hours to kill before my train so I whiled my time away at the fantastic night food market. Everything was on sale it seemed, from whole squid on a stick to sickly brightly coloured jelly sweets. I waddled up to the station to catch my train, but in the true travel story cliche as it pulled in it only had 18 carriages. And my bed was in coach 19. Of course everything was actually under control, and soon my carriage was being connected. Through an intricate system of horizontal and vertical wavings of a torch light the engineer soon got the carriage connected - only signalling to stop once the carriage had rammed the rest of the train to the extent I think some people fell from the footplate. Something about stable doors and bolting horses briefly sprang to mind...

Indside the train was basic, but clean. It was organized in bunks of two beds, one either side of the carriage with clean bedsheets and a place to store bags. Toilets were western (to my relief) and provided that feeling of genuine rawness by virtue of the fact you could see the track flying past when looking throught them. Apart from the brattish children with the ineffective mother in the bunk next to mine sleep was good almost all the way into Bangkok.


Dive Log
81 - South West, Koh Tao, Thailand, 08:35, 51 min, 27.7m, av19.2m, 32%!o(MISSING)2, 200->80
82 - Hin Pee Wee, Koh Tao, Thailand, 10:39, 49 min, 23.7m, av16.7m, 32%!o(MISSING)2, 200->100

---