trains, planes, & long-tailed boats

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We finally managed to find our way out of Pai a few days ago despite the rumours that we had actually stumbled into a Truman Show set ... trapped in by mountainous backdrops, tripped up by fog machines, tracked down and tagged like caged monkeys. Nonetheless, tattooed and triumphant, we piled ourselves into yet another bus of questionable construction and plummetted down the mountainside and back into the familiar sois of Chiang Mai where we seemlessly slid into a waiting tuk-tuk and slumped right on to the train stamped BKK.

Much to the chagrin of comfort (in holding onto much more of our pocket-baht, however, TMIT grinned away), the only tickets left were 3rd class sitters -- as in not sleepers -- and so we threw our packs up above us and plopped (and the grin fades ...) onto the concrete benches we would call home for the 14 hours. Okay so they weren't concrete. But it's not that hyperbolous of a metaphor. And I tell you, as the hours dropped away, the wood beneath us petrified to point where it may have actually stood its own against a slab of concrete, it took that long. But, hey, the scenery was nice.

Naturally we were dozing off and waking up about every 15 minutes during the night, and between the people who walked down the isles carrying banana leaf wrapped snacks chanting "ao mai ka ... ao mai ka ..." and the occasional stops along the way it was, to say the least, a fitfull sleep. There was one particular image burned in my mind that has been hard to shake. One of the many times I woke with a start was when we were pulling up to the Lopburi stop. The slightly atonal ring-a-ding over the loud speakers every station insists on bellowing before making any sort of announcement rang-a-dang and I opened my eyes with a start, staring in amazement at a pair of ornately detailed, golden monkey balls approximately slightly larger than the bench we sat on. Eventually I followed the contours of the rest of the beast, shadowed in night-shade, and realized I was staring at a baboon statue of such size it actually upstaged any buddha in any wat I've seen anywhere. It was, sincerely, frightening.

Shaking off baboon nightmares, we arrived in Bangkok around 6 a.m. and found ourselves a friendly ticket booth and promptly reserved 2 sleepers seats for the next leg of our trip (we, in the name of pocket-baht, had decided to chop off the parts of our trip breaking up this long haul south ... so no town of monkeys, Lopburi, and possibly no Adaman coast islands). With 8hrs to kill and a bleak, rainy, smoggy, yucky yucky frame of the city beyond the treshold of the station we opted to spend it on the second floor of a coffee shop playing 500 rummy and taking turns walking laps around the station for the sake of blood flow (my ankles actually swelled from dehydration and lack of moment ... and I thank you, mom, for not giving me the genes for naturally fat ankles because it's just really uncomfortable and not at all cute).

And so we board. And so we sleep (finally) in these fun little bunks and finally we get to our stop (another 12 hrs later) and disembark directly into the hands of a scam. It was 3:30 in the morning, so don't be too judgemental in our lack of foresight here, but we end up getting talked into getting into a songtaew (despite the fact that we read somewhere that buses go directly from the station to Krabi) to be taken to the bus stop and, instead, we're dropped off at the driver's friend's travel agency. Blah, blah, blah -- we managed to circumvent the real scam part, stumbling around yet another tiny concrete minimetrapolis in search of the public bus station ... only to find that there isn't one -- it's at the train station. Ha. We got ourselves on a bus, nonetheless, without having to pay too much more than necessary and arrived in Krabi around 9:30 this morning.

Showered, fed, and stationary we're ready for our hammock-swinging, wave-lapping island paradise. And so off we go bungalow hunting.

I would like to, however, leave you with one piece of advice:
When travelling for 40+ hours consecutively ... don't wear a thong.

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