Krabi To Bangkok

One more day in Krabi town and we would be heading to the capital city, Bangkok. After breakfast we negotiated a good price with the lady on reception (who may or may not have thought James was trying to chat her up the day before – I think something got lost in translation) which meant that we would get picked up at the hotel and dropped at the train station in Surat Thani. Simple you might think, but otherwise we would need to get from our hotel to the bus station in Krabi, by tuk-tuk, buy a ticket and get to Surat Thani, by bus, then get another tuk-tuk from Surat Thani town centre to the train station that is 13km west. It is never easy, and the guidebooks and internet forums neglect to mention those little precious nuggets of information. So to get picked up and dropped off directly for 300 Baht each seemed a good price.

The hotel were kind enough to look after our bags whilst we wasted time til 4pm when we were to be picked up. In the meantime we didn’t really achieve much, just wandered round the few bits of Krabi town that we hadn’t yet seen. We never actually found “Magic House” that James had seen on the map, but it was too hot to go back on ourselves to locate it. We saw more and more stray dogs along the way, and kept well away from them. We even came across a huge indoor/covered market area, which had about 96% of the stalls shut (on a Sunday), and this included the toilets much to James’s distress, but they did allow people on mopeds and scooters to ride through the aisles like it was an episode of Kickstart or something.

Any idea what these are???

We pushed on and wandered down by the river for one last time, and realising that we were also getting pushed for time we upped the speed and made it back to the hotel in time for the pick-up. A small mini-van had turned up, with two German girls already in it. Not a huge surprise there. And I’ll wager that at least one of them had read, or was in the middle of reading, Fifty Shades Of Grey. That book is everywhere! A little cramped, but safely sat on the vehicle that would take us the 2 and a half hour trip over to Surat Thani, we tried as best we could to get comfortable, and angle as much AC on us as humanly possible – we were still piping hot from the power-walk back to the hotel. There was one more pick-up to do, at a local bar/café just down the road, and then we were off! And then we stopped, in a side road area that looked like a run-down bus stop/hang out. Everyone got off, and we assumed that these were the people getting the bus up to Bangkok and chortled slightly that we would have the mini-van to ourselves. Our laughs were cut short when the driver ushered us out too, as we would all be changing. I can’t use the phrase Svitlana taught us as you people might get on to Google Translate and I would get in trouble, but both James and I know what I mean here…

What a bus station!

We would be waiting for over an hour for our coach to take us to Surat Thani, and it seemed like everyone was doing the same trip as us, with some going all the way on the bus and some getting off and onto the comfier (hopefully) train. The coach was good enough, save for the idiot behind us who somehow kept putting his knees into both my and James’s chair back. And after two hours we had arrived……somewhere. Luggage was being removed and people jumping off the bus, but it couldn’t be the train station as nobody had told us. As both mine and James’s bags had been lobbed onto the pavement I thought it prudent to ask just what the heck was going on. From what I gathered from the 3 drivers/baggage handlers I was 80% sure that we were at the train station, so gestured for James to get off also. We grabbed our bags and headed overt to the train station, that may or may not be Surat Thani.

We had got chatting to two girls and a guy who were also going to the train station so all 5 of us marched into the train station and eventually got confirmation that we were in the right place and that we would all have a long time to wait for our trains. The girls (Chloe and Laura…or “Chlora”) were going to KL at half 1 and me, James and Duncan would be heading up to Bangkok at half 11. That was provided everything arrived on time, and after a quick look at the whiteboard with all the train times on it it looked like most trains would be delayed at least some amount of time. Laura, Chloe and Duncan parked themselves in a café to leech the Wi-Fi and me and James made camp on the platform. The others joined us after being kicked out of the café due to the staff wanting to close up and go home – so selfish! We sat on the platform and swapped stories of travelling, work and life in general, until the lady with the dry-wipe marker came out and added some numbers to train 38……our train.

James, Chloe, Laura, Tim and Duncan......waiting

We were looking at an 80 minute delay, and to rub salt into the wounds, it looked like the girls’ train would be arriving a few minutes early, at precisely 01:23. How they knew that so far ahead of time I don’t know, and I didn’t care, as all I knew was that we would be waiting til 12:45 at least to get on board our sleeper carriage. So we continued our chat, feeling a little bit like the Reeves And Mortimer sketch of Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye, watching the trains coming in and going out again.

And then ours was due, and only a few minutes later than 12:45, but we were just thankful that it had turned up at all! We said goodbye to the girls (until Vietnam potentially) and clambered aboard. It seemed pretty much like the one we got from KL to Had Yai only a few days before, but there was less space up top for me, the AC was VERY loud by my ears, but at least we were at the absolute back of the train and would not have constant traffic to and from the toilets. We would be arriving in to Bangkok at about 11:30 so I left my alarm on for 9am, just in case, and tried to get as comfortable as you can do when you are in a thin train carriage with 40 strangers and essentially only a large towel to cover your modesty.