Local bus, anyone?

STATS: Day count=27; Current Illness count=0 (all in full health… for now); theft count=0; rip-off count=0.2 (we’re sure we were overcharged for a bus journey, but can’t prove it!); tourist screw-up count=0.7 (no change); Chris’ photo count=300; Emma’s photo count=7

A little while since the last update – we’ve not been in places with internet access in our room and to be quite honest, we have far more exciting things to do than write blog updates! ;-) Seriously, though, thanks for the encouragement about the blog – it always feels very self-indulgent to be telling everyone about our ‘holiday’ in great detail, so it’s good to hear that people (at least some of you!) are enjoying the updates. I will continue for as long as that does.

We’ve been away for 4 weeks now – that matches our longest holiday to date. That means we are now officially not “on holiday” but are “travelling”. So I will be growing my hair long, sporting a beard, Em will be getting her hair braided and we’ll both return with tattoos and various body piercings. And I expect I’ll be wearing a sarong. If it’s good enough for David Beckham….

Just to set the scene, we’re currently sitting in a (relatively) expensive ‘farang’ (foreigner) bar, just about to watch Murray play in the Australian Open final against Federer. I have a large beer, mainly to take the taste away from the hideous durian ice cream that I tried an hour or two ago (and the taste is still there!) – durian is supposed to smell awful but taste nice. Well all I can say is if it smells worse than it tastes, it must smell REALLY, REALLY bad! I had to try durian while out here – it is the ‘done thing’ and I eased myself in gently with an ice cream rather than the fruit itself. Rather than give the whole ice cream portion back hardly touched, I forced myself to eat almost half of it – trying to ensure each mouthful touched as few taste buds as possible. The taste is hard to describe. Awful is as close as I can get. I even appreciated the almost as bad coffee that I got with it (very strong, even 3 sachets of coffee mate only managed to turn it from deep black to black) as it tried its best to remove the durian taste from my mouth. The Chang beer is doing a much better job at the moment, but probably because at 6.4% it is dulling my taste buds. Durian – if you get the chance, try it. It’s an experience.

So we left Krabi a while ago now – probably a week, our sense of time is becoming non-existent. We headed for Khao Sok – a place on the edge of a rainforest. Managed to take the worst possible bus route there, but we did get there without too much trouble. One of the problems is that when you arrive at a bus station, you have about 10 people trying to tell you where you should be going. And, I hesitate to say it, you cant trust any of them. “Oh, you cant get a bus direct to Khoa Sok, you need to get a mini-bus”. “The next bus doesn’t leave for 2 hours – we can take you directly”. “You need to go via Takua Pa and change there”. “You have to pay to go to Bangkok, then get dropped off”. “Yes, you can go via Surat Thani – that’s the best route”. Only one of those statements was true, and we had to work out which one! We got it wrong, but we got there after about 5 hours on the bus.

That’s 5 hours on a bus where the first half (we changed buses after about 3 hours) had a conductor that seemed to like karaoke. So much so that he played a karaoke DVD very loudly for the duration. Thai music but the lyrics were displayed in both Thai and phonetic translation to the western alphabet. I guess he wanted tourists to join in and sing along. We didn’t. Luckily no one else did either. I hope he wasn’t too disappointed.

Didn’t have any accommodation booked but got a lift with someone touting accommodation to the main ‘resort area’ as it was a couple of km away from the main road, and while a couple of km doesn’t sound like much, in the midday sun with full rucksacks it can easily feel like a trans-Saharan trek. The place we were taken to seemed ok too – nice bamboo bungalow thing, on stilts (to avoid snakes I expect), our own little balcony thing, with en-suite, hot, shower (we were sold at that point!) and half the price I was worried we’d have to pay (when looking at prices of the nearby places). And a Winnie the Pooh themed mosquito net – how could we resist? And the restaurant did fantastic green curries. We had the usual resident little geckos in the evening plus a large (for a gecko – about 12” long) tokay gecko (for those in the know, largest gecko) who took up residence above our bed one evening – for once it was Emma who didn’t like this – usually it was spiders – this time the tables were turned and I had no problem with it. I mean – it was cute!

Stayed here a few days – shunning the local tours (which were probably excellent) and heading off into the rainforest on our own. Hardly an expedition worthy of Livingstone, however – the (few) trails were well marked and machetes were only optional. I was on the hunt for wild snakes (apparently vipers and cobras are relatively common there), Emma on the hunt for elephant. I think I had the tougher spotting job, but probably the higher chance of success. Unfortunately we were both disappointed, but only on the spotting front. The walks we did over a couple of days were really nice – hot, but with a nice plunge in the river at the end to cool off. Their concept of “waterfall” was interesting – the first point of interest on the walk we reached was a “small but pretty waterfall where two rivers meet”. Small was a bit of an understatement. Rain flowing over a kerb would have been a bigger waterfall than the one we encountered! Still, it was pretty and after a hot trek in the forest it was nice to dip our feet in. We spotted lots of lizards (and nasty spiders) and some cool monkeys (dusky langurs – looked like black-and-white minstrels did their make-up) which leapt impressively from tree top to tree top while their calls (especially on our early morning walk when the forest seemed very eerie) were very haunting.

I fear that I have lost favour with The Buddha. I thought it was just bad luck that with the first chance to get a hot water shower for many days, after Emma had savoured an apparently lovely shower, I was about to step in when the whole town suffered a power cut (it was an electric shower). “When is the power likely to come back?” we asked. “Maybe half an hour. Maybe two hours.” came the shrugged shoulders, but smiling reply. Great. I just put it down to bad luck, but that night my cloth bracelet ‘given’ (with appropriate donation – see previous post) to me by Buddhist monks mysteriously untied itself. Confirmation indeed that I had done something wrong in His eyes. Being a vegetarian, I couldn’t think what – I must have trodden on an ant or something similar. We hastily re-tied the band, hoping that He hadn’t noticed. And the power did come back on and I got a nice shower, so maybe I have repented enough.

Does anyone know what a sapodilla fruit is? I had a sapodilla shake without knowing what it was (I must stop trying out anything I have never heard of!). The colour wasn’t all that pleasant, but it tasted ok. I need to look up what a sapodilla is. It can’t be a member of the durian family anyway, since it was drinkable!

Everyone out here (in the sticks) seems to keep dogs. And the place we stayed at had a really cute puppy. It tried to bite Emma’s ankles (with those really sharp puppy-teeth that they have!). Emma thought it was cute, until it weed on the floor and then got hold of her shoes (left at the entrance, as you do here) and started to chew them.

I’ve learned how to collect rubber. Many places here have small bags tied to trees, with a small piece of bark stripped above the bag and a funnelling tube inserted in the trunk to guide the rubber into the bag. I wandered into one of these ‘farms’ to see the setup – the rubber is solidified by the time it collects in the bag. Not sure how useful this new-found knowledge will be in life, but it’s good to be learning new things!

After a few days at Khao Sok we moved on. Next stop was Chumphon. I have no idea why we wanted to stop here, but in the interest of marital compromise (I think it’s written on the certificate, somewhere), I just let it go with minimal moaning. It apparently has fruit orchards. It is also apparently a place that people tend not to stay at – they just transit there to one of the nearby islands (we’ve had our fill of islands for now!). Still, I’ve not seen an apple tree for a while, so fruit orchards it is.

Once again, we decided to take the ‘local bus’ rather than any form of comfortable transportation. It’s far more authentic and, supposedly, cheaper, although the one time we didn’t check the price beforehand we seemed to be charged as much as for a comfortable mini-bus. Hence the increase in the “tourist rip-off” statistic. Ah well.

Local buses in Thailand. Hmmm. We shunned the air-con, VIP, toilet, non-stopping buses in favour of the “going-native” local buses. And we don’t regret the decision. We were considering at some point having a Thai massage – supposed to be very good for you – quite rough pummelling all over your body, apparently. After the 7 hour bus journey (more music DVDs, a scheduled change of bus at a bus station we couldn’t find for an hour, despite actually being in it, unawares, when we started out, and an unscheduled change of bus for a reason we couldn’t fathom) we no longer need a Thai massage. The buses are basic but pleasant enough inside – no air con, but the clever rotating ceiling fans inside the bus and the open windows were fine – however, they do seem to have lost their suspension springs about 20 years previously. The 7 hour hammering would have cost a good 1000 Baht at a massage parlour. That may have been more pleasant though. Still, if nothing else we did prove to ourselves that the friendly tour operator who told us “there is no local bus to Chumphon. You have to get a mini-bus” was simply lying. Shame – with all the friendliness of the Thai people so far it’s the lying (not even understandable bending of the truth to get a sale) that sticks in the mind.

Arrived at Chumphon. There’s nothing here. In a day and a half I have taken 2 photos. That’s probably less than in the UK. One of the photos (attached) does seem to show an interesting attitude towards the treatment of women. I kind of like the idea (of course, I could have got hold of the wrong end of the stick here). We’re moving on tomorrow. To be fair, it’s a regular town, and today is Sunday, but when I asked at the tourist information centre “We’ve just arrived. What do people tend to do around here?” there was a silence, some heavy thinking, and a reply “Well, there is the night market…”. Still, it’s a place to stop before the next bus journey onwards tomorrow (Monday 1st Feb).

Next stop is Petchaburi. That doesn’t even have fruit orchards. However, it is on the way towards Bangkok and has in interesting old town, apparently.

Murray has almost lost the match, but I have found some wi-fi access so at least I can publish this. Swings and roundabouts…