Advertisement
Interesting selection...
what are the round ball things on the right hand side? We would have tried one but we were stuffed!Just a note before this short blog starts properly…after leaving the UK 2041 days ago, we have reached a milestone 100th blog and almost 90,000 hits!
Talking to the travel agents on Koh Samui about onward transport to Surat Thani was frustrating. According to them, there were only a couple of ferries a day and although pick up from any Samui hotel was included on these annoying transport packages, it was a full 3 hours before the ferry departed! So for a 3pm ferry this meant we would be collected at midday…completely ridiculous seeings though we were only a 15 minute drive from the ferry port.
We then decided to start questioning the travel agents about ‘going-it-alone’, by the looks on their faces when we asked, it was as if we were about to embark on a trek into the deepest and darkest Thai wilderness with tigers there waiting to eat us! Of course, they all denied, when asked, that it could be done alone. Luckily we had a car, so we went on a fact finding mission to Nathon port where we discovered (which we had a hunch we would!) there were ferries every hour to Don Sak
pier. There even used to be ferries which went straight into Surat Thani town and therefore bypassing the 90km, hour and a half bus ride but these had (unfortunately) been stopped.
Now knowing what we needed to do on the day of our departure from Koh Samui we left our hotel at 1:15pm for the 2pm ferry, we headed to the Seatran ferry office and bought a ticket each for 220 baht (£4.50) which included a bus at Don Sak to take us to Surat Thani town. Compared to the travel agents, this was super cheap as they wanted anywhere from 550 baht to 700 baht (£11-14) per person for the trip! Jan and Paul walked us to the ferry boarding area and after a tearful goodbye, we were off and away. The ferry ride really was smooth sailing, with plenty of opportunities for us to point out really inappropriately dressed people on the ferry. Seriously, just because you are in Asia and in the sun does NOT give you the right to walk around with no top on (guys) or just wearing a bikini top (girls), tatty fisherman pants/shorts and no shoes or flip flops. Seriously, why on
earth would anyone want to walk around with no shoes on (especially in Asia) there could be anything on that floor.
The ferry was quite a comfortable ride and we sat right in front of the massage ‘shop’…yes, the strange thing about Thai ferries is that there is always a massage section on the ferry, we aren’t sure why but there is! Arriving into Don Sak pier, it was really easy to find our bus while all the other foreigners were herded away onto the ‘special’ buses (nothing special about them, they were just reserved for those through ticket jobbies). We were the only non-Thai’s on our bus and the bus driver was a really old guy – he looked about 90 years old and seemed to have great difficulty in keeping his eyes open while he was driving, his head kept nodding downwards as he was falling asleep and he kept waking himself up with a jump every now and again. We got to Surat Thani town without crashing or the driver falling completely asleep and when we were getting off he even shouted and shooed those pesky taxi touts away on our behalf!
We only had
The ferry to Don Sak
Spot the inappropriately dressed person! a short walk to our fantastic hotel – 450 baht (£9!) for a huge room with air con, TV, fridge and hot water. The staff at the hotel were really sweet and although they didn’t speak much English they did their best with sign language and a binder full of info to help us with whatever we needed. The best thing about Surat Thani is definitely the night market which is held every night and has stall after stall of fantastic food. We had high expectations of the night market and we weren’t disappointed. We started by working up an appetite with a walk down to the Tapee River and around town, we were actually quite shocked as we saw a total of 4 other tourists the whole time we were in Surat Thani; we imagined it would be more like a transit town like Krabi but it was far more ‘local’ with no tourists in sight.
We learnt a couple of things at this night market – the first, our chilli tolerance is now huge and unfortunately our tummies have shrunk. Back at the night market we kicked things off with a strawberry shake between us (20 baht
– 40p) which was a real treat as we don’t often get strawberries in SE Asia. We then browsed the stalls looking for more food, we settled on a small stall which had a sit down plastic chair restaurant behind it and had green curry and chicken chilli basil – which were Thai spicy just how we like it! We then followed that by sharing one of the best banana roti we have ever had, again for just 20 baht. By this point we were completely stuffed and felt a little bit pathetic and deflated from being full on half a strawberry shake, a small portion of curry and half a banana roti. We were very disappointed in ourselves that we couldn’t eat more! We were very tempted to just buy some things as we were very curious about these things on sticks (they looked like battered apples), but we'd have felt incredibly guilty about wasting food, so we will just have to wait until our next night market experience to satisfy our curiosity!
On our walk around Surat Thani, we noticed a lot of Chinese temples (we counted at least 4 within a 5 minutes radius of each
other) rather than the traditional Thai buddhist temples you see in other Thai towns. We haven’t been able to find out the reason for the Chinese temples, but an educated guess would say at some point in Surat Thani’s history a large Chinese population settled here and the temples are still standing.
We were surprised at how nice a place Surat Thani was and enjoyed our night’s stay – the night market is definitely worthwhile! We had a flight early the next morning back to Bangkok which meant a super-early before 5am start, we were so confident in our ability to wake up in time that we set 4 alarms to make sure we were at the ‘airport express’ bus stop in time to get to the airport for our flight. In reality, this bus stop is just in front of a coffee shop, we waited a while and paid our 100 baht each for the bus ride and Neil got talking to a nice old guy, who apparently used to be part of the local government of Surat Thani. He was a nice chatty fella who had very strong views on his country and his English was excellent
so it made for a very interesting conversation.
On check in for our Air Asia flight, we discovered that their genius computer system had AGAIN split us up (seats 15C and 25D this time!) and the check in staff wanted to weigh our carry-on bags too…oh dear, we knew we were going to be overweight so employed the nifty, keep hold of your bag to take some of the weight off it trick when it was on the scales! The thing was, the baggage guy saw what we were doing, winked at us and tagged the bags as ok for carry-on! When on the plane we just couldn’t believe Air Asia and their seating arrangements, Donna ended up moving from her seat as a family with a little boy had been split up into different parts of the plane. Seriously, Air Asia is a good airline and they really shouldn’t resort to cheap tricks like this to force people into spending more money to reserve seats in advance. But budget airlines just push the boundaries whenever they can, so we aren’t too surprised.
Luckily, we managed this flight without emergency landings, sudden drops or aborted landings and made
it back to Bangkok in plenty of time for our flight out of Thailand. Our next blog is a revisit of a place and we were genuinely shocked and dismayed at what we found there…more to come very soon!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.092s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0591s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
TALLGAY
non-member comment
LOVE YOUR BLOGS! KEEP YOUR STORIES COMING. AH THAILAND, THE LAND OF PAY-ME-FOR-MY-SMILES