West coast to east coast

13.07.2011

Using public transport to get from one tourist destination to another was quite easy in Malaysia, but next to impossible in Thailand. Instead, you resort to travel agencies. Today’s travel smoothly demonstrated the ability of Thai travel agencies to come together to provide a single master plan. First, we bought our ticket (taking us from Railay Beach to Koh Phangan) with an agent. Our receipt got us onto a longtail boat, which took us to another pier where we’re joined up with other backpackers (who had used other travel agencies). There was a lot of speculation as to what would happen next, as only the travel agents spoke English. Again showing our receipt to various drivers at the pier, we were shoved into a mini bus (which they like to call A/C vans) and we were off! That is, until the A/C van driver was fed up and dumped us at a road-side house turned into a ticket office. There, we were gestured to queue up, with a woman eventually exchanging our receipt for another receipt, in addition to (crucially) a colour-coded sticker (similar to the badge that a child would get when flying alone) which bore the name of our final destination. After waiting for an hour, another A/C van came along and took us to another one of these intermediate stops. There, our freshly issued receipt was taken and we were given… nothing. Apparently, our coloured sticker would more than suffice. We waited another hour and this time a (normal sized) bus arrives! The bus takes us to a pier where a ferry (which we barely made it onto) is about to take us to Koh Phangan. Before we are allowed to leave the bus, however, we’re given yet another (and our final) ticket by the bus driver: the ticket for the ferry, of course! All good, we arrived at Koh Phangan without having to do anything but wait - we even made some friends along the way.