Into Thailand

Day 16 (15/04/08): Thai Transportation

The original plan had always been to cross into Thailand at Sungai Kolok and then catch a train to the town of Surat Thani. We had been investigating train tickets from Malaysia, however it was Thai New Years, and everything we read said that there were no train tickets left. We had also spoken to a few other backpackers who had said the same thing. So it was with a bit of trepidation as Siona and I left the hostel and caught one of the early local buses to the the Thai border, not knowing what would happen when we crossed the border. The town of Sungai Kolok has had a bit of unrest in the last few years with a few bombings and other acts of violence, so we didn't really want to spend any more time there than possible.

The bus stops on the Malaysian side of the border, and you then walk across the bridge into Thailand, the first time either of us had 'walked' across a border. Passport control was pretty simple, a small building on the side of the road. The man behind the counter spent a long time with my passport, cross-referencing bits of paper and checking all sorts of things. Eventually it was all sorted, and we were officially in Thailand, the third country on my trip!

Siona and I ingored all the taxi touts and walked into the town of Sungai Kolok. We managed to find the train station, and much to our joy, they had train tickets to Surat Thani, third class train tickets. Nevertheless it was great news to us, and we spent a few hours exploring Sungai Kolok, finding some food and getting supplies for the upcoming 10 hour train journey.

Third class Thai trains are definitely an interesting experience. The seats are simple bench seats, arranged in pairs facing each other, built for people of Thai stature. Now, I am not the tallest person, but I am stiller taller than the average Thai. So my knees finished a mere inches from the person opposite me, and I was too tall to rest my head on the back rest, which has a metal bar anyway. There was no air-con, only a bunch of fans mounted into the ceiling, and we kept all the windows open. Luckily we had seats, as after the second stop, the train was reduced to standing room only, as all the Thai families were returning home from their New Year festivites. We shuddered to think that some of these people might be returning to Bangkok, over 20 hours away! Oh well, it was only ten hours for us...

The trip actually passed reasonably quickly, we both listened to our ipods for most of the time and just tried to phase out the rumbling noise and squash of people. We played the part of 'scary westerners' pretty well, because the locals gave us a slightly bigger personal space than normal. Vendors selling everything from food and cold drinks to fruit and handmade jewellery consistently sold their wares down the aisles. At each stop as many people seemed to get on the train as off the train, so it was always full. We sat there in our hard bench seats, struggling to hear our ipod music over the rumble of a third class carriage, and dreamed about the bastards in second class with their recliner seats and air-conditioning. The fare difference between the classes is only a few NZ dollars, so that just rubbed salt into the wound. To make matters worse, my left foot had started swelling up and was getting quite painful. I couldn't see what had happened to my toe wounds, as they were covered in band-aids.

In a miracle of all miracles, the train actually gained time. It had left Sungai Kolok almost two hours late, and so we were sure that we would be at least two hours late, if not more. Normally this wouldn't have mattered, but we were hoping to catch the 11pm night ferry to the island of Koh Phangan, our final destination. So we were very much suprised when the train pulled into Surat Thani, a good hour before we expected it to. We found another backpacker who had also been in third class, and we caught a taxi straight to the ferry terminal. The night ferry is a small two level boat with a number of mattresses arranged in rows. The ticket price is the same as the normal fast day boat, but this way we were also getting a nights accomodation. The mattresses on the boat were pretty solid, they felt more like sand-bags than mattresses, and the boat wasn't particularly quiet. But we didn't care! It was a horizontal surface, and that is all we cared about!

I pulled off my plasters to have a look at my toe. The middle toe on the left, which had the worst abrasion from snorkelling was all swollen up, the wound was twice the size it was before, and surrounded in swollen, pus-filled flesh. It was definitely infected! Oh well, nothing I could do about it now, might as well just enjoy my horizontal surface. It was now 11pm, and we had been travelling via bus, foot and train since 8am, and we still had 7 hours to go on the boat, so a great day for distance gained, but our bodies were wrecked. Sleep came very easy, and besides the solid mattress, it was one of the best sleeps I have ever had.