Travelers At Heart

The plan was to make the last week of our travels a relaxing holiday. We were going to stay on Koh Phi Phi and enjoy everything it has to offer us for a whole week. However, we are travelers and can't seem to stay in one place for very long anymore. We made the decision to go to one more island. Tonight we leave for Koh Tao, an island in the Gulf of Thailand.

We check-out of our hotel in the morning and leave our bags at the travel agency with whom we booked our journey. We're still entitled to use the hotel's pool, and that's what we do. The pool was busier today. Maybe a sign that it is a good time to leave the island. We don't like the crowds. It was nice relaxing in the sun. Rachelle was sure the pool bar did breakfast, so that was the plan. The pool bar didn't do breakfast. We had to eat Thai food as a morning meal.

At about 2PM, we packed our things, changed into clothes in the pool toilets, picked up some snacks from the 7-Eleven and went to the pier to wait for our boat. At 3:45PM we boarded and found seats. Then, off the ferry and onto a mini-bus for a short journey. Off the mini-bus and onto another for a much longer journey to Suratthani, where our night-ferry is waiting for us.

Rachelle, nor I, knew night-ferries even existed in this manner. It's another type of transport we can add to the list. However, it's not one we want to. The night-ferry is horrible. It's one big room with mattresses, laid side-by-side, along both walls. No dividers, just mattresses making one long bed. Above the mattresses are numbers, and these are the seat numbers (or bed numbers in this case). I worked out that it was about two and a half people per double mattress, and the mattresses were not very big. Forty people on each side of the boat. I'm not a particularly large person and I only just fit into a designated space. Of course, the fattest couple on the boat are next to me. We're all very squashed in. It wasn't even clean, nor was it air-conditioned. It was a nightmare and overtakes the sleeper-bus in the ranks of worst transport used in Southeast Asia.