Soooo, we got to watch the last 15 minutes of the World Cup Final. That was probably the most normal 15 minutes of the journey from Bangkok to the island of Koh Tao - and that was in a strange building on a pier in what I can only assume was the town of Chumphon or Chumporn as it was often spelled. But let's back up.
We made it to the travel agent where we bought our bus and ferry tickets a few minutes before six. 10 minutes later the women tells us to follow a very emo looking Thai man outside. He told us to stand across the street with a few other people standing with packs. After few minutes on the street corner he tells us to follow him: through an alley, into and through a muay Thai training center, down another dark alley to a cafe, where we sat for another half hour until the bus came. Once on the bus it was ok for the first 3 hours while Avatar was playing, except I think we were going like 40 miles an hour the whole time and stopping every 20 minutes for no apparent reason.
Somewhere along way we dropped a man off in the middle of nowhere on the side of the highway. Literally the middle of nowhere. The was a big building in the dstance, nothing on the side of the road except a sign indicating a town was 28 kilometers away. At this point I took a NyQuil because I thought we would be on the bus for another 6 hours and I wanted to be able to sleep. BAD IDEA. An hour later we stopped at a shack on the side of the road for a bland overpriced plate of rice and egg. I was like a zombie there, couldn't really focus my eyes or carry on a conversation.
I managed to sleep for the next 3 hours until the lights came on and a man told us to get off the bus. We wre just at the side of the road again. Our bags lumped in a pile. He said get into that minibus, pointed to a white minivan, then hopped on the bus and drove away. We threw our packs in the back and crammed 10 people plus the driver into he van. I had to sit next to the driver on the front bench sea. He was drinking cough syrup I'm pretty sure. The town smelled like rotten fish. We drove for half and hour, I tried to sleep by resting my head on my 2 liter bottle of water but it didn't work. So instead I prayed that we didn't crash and that we weren't getting kidnapped - those seemed like the 2 most likely possibilities. After half an hour of honking at stray dogs lying in the road, we pulled up at the random building and watched the soccer game. The man told us the ferry would come at 7 am, then drove away. It was 3:30.
After the game we pulled up a couple of old van bench seats and attempted to sleep. At sunrise, after buses of people arrived every half hour, the boat came. We boarded, were accosted by men trying to get us to stay at their hotels, found one from the hotel we wanted and then slept for 2 hours. After disembarking the boat we followed the hotel man to a free taxi - a pickup truck with bench seats like before except with no cover and were on our way.
The hotel is great and we started scuba diving today. More on that tomorrow.
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