Thailand - Land of Smiles

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Immigration in any country is never easy, especially one where there is a mandatory death penalty for smuggling drugs, so crossing between 2 such countries by ourselves with suspiciously large backpacks was never going to be a picnic. So having successfully negotiated the port immigration at Satun, Thailand, when our taxi got pulled over by Customs police further down the road our hearts were in our mouths and brown stains in our pants. Luckily, when asked what was in our backpacks, Andrew quickly said "hair potions and clothes", followed closely by Lara muttering "shoes and make up". Gay? Not us - its amazing what comes out under pressure - like a job interview - you just say the first thing which comes into your head and hope you can deliver the goods later - luckily travelling with Lara makes things like that easy! It satisfied the officials and we were off.

As the seasoned travellers that we now are we had decided to negotiate our own way accross Thailand - how hard can it be! Well........

Thai people are lovely, except in the provinces (and rightly so) the grasp of English is limited at best so the slower we spoke english the quicker they replied in Thai. Luckily an illegal cabby stepped in and before we knew it we were trafficking 6 tubes of pringles to the town we wanted to go to for a bargain price and a ride in a "vintage" merc. Weird?? Well it got us where we wanted to go anyway. After another journey on another local bus (none of these tour bus cop outs for us!), 5 hours later we arrived in Surat Thani for our overnight ferry to Ko Pha Ngan.

The ferry was an experience. It was EXTREMELY rough - yep the weather was bad (surprise surprise - the orr weather curse was definitely following us). The boat was literally tipping from side to side. In the UK the boat would have been cancelled, in Thailand it was full steam ahead - I really do question their Health and Safety legislation. Andrew managed to sleep while Lara reviewed the will she had written before leaving wondering whether her sisters did really deserve free picking at her clothes. We did arrive alive (just) after 9 hours (should have been 4) and .....ITS RAINING. Not just a little bit but proper tropical piss down rain and with no where to stay, our moods were not improving.

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