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Published: March 27th 2011
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It is always a bad start to a day when you wake up in the morning and the sun is shining. Now, this might not conform to most people's ideas of a bad day, but when you purposefully change your travel plans for a day on the beach, and it rains, the sun is a bad sight on the day that you are leaving. It was in this bright sunny manner thato probably the worst day of our traveling adventure to date started.
Our sole plan for the day was to make it to Ko Phi Phi, an idyllic island off the coast of Thailand so that we could do a bit of snorkeling, and more lounging on a beach, before heading in and for a bit more culture.
In order to prevent any mishaps we had pre-booked the travel in order to give us a nice easy, if slightly boring day. We were collected,slightly earlier than expected, by our taxi driver and we were soon at the Jetty and sitting on a ferry over to Satun, a small city in the South of Thailand.
Upon arrival at Thailand we were met at the Jetty by our another
man from the agency whose job it was to put us on a bus in order to make it to the next ferry terminal to get the boat over to Ko Phi Phi.
It was therefore a little bit of a set back when he informed us that the bus would not arrive in Krabi until after the final ferry had left for Ko Phi Phi. This was slightly annoying for four reasons. Firstly, I wanted to be in Ko Phi Phi to snorkel and lounge, not in Krabi. Secondly, we had specifically gone through a travel agent to avoid this. Thirdly, if I wasn't going to make it until the next day I could have been lounging on a beach in Langkawi instead of standing in a hot room with a heavy rucksack on and finally, I was pretty certain we weren't meant to be catching the connection from Krabi in the first place.
After some choice words, where Stephanie managed to both, calm me, slightly, and get me on the bus which was the only option available to us. It was in this way that I found myself on a barely watertight bus, in the middle of a torrential downpour, with water leaking on my head heading towards Krabi with a manic bus driver at the wheel. Fortunately, part way through and with only a slightly damp head and shoe the rain stopped, the temperature picked up and the air conditioning kicked in. Ten minutes later, the air conditioning was dripping on my trousers.
After 5 hours of this joyful experience we eventually arrived in Krabi and, 20minutes later we were checked in to a hostel in the centre of Krabi. A lovely little town, but with very little to do in the town itself and only slightly less idyllic than Ko Phi Phi. The only other difference between the two places is that Ko Phi Phi has running water, whereas the entirety of Krabi does not due to some disaster that our hostel manager couldn't quite explain to me.
As you are no doubt beginning to imagine this is not shaping up to be the best day of our adventure. Yet, miraculously, it can still get worse. After logging in and checking our e-mails we had a response from the company helping us plan our trip in Russia. Knowing full well that we were half way around the world and that we could not get a visa without the invitation they gave us on the day we left, they waited until we were approximately 6000 miles away to tell us we could only get a tourist visa in London!
This no doubt will add a few problems to our trip, most notably how we get back from Beijing however, I'm sure something will pan out in the end. Remarkably it has been Steph who has been the calmest about all of this, though that may be because she is still angry she didn't get a bigger discount off her massage.
Oh well, onwards and upwards. By this time tomorrow I will be relaxing in Ko Phi Phi...hopefully!
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Kate
non-member comment
Oh Dear!
Does nthis mean you can't go to Russia?