Our next destination after Pai was Koh Chang, an island off the coast of Thailand southeast of Bangkok. We were told to get there by taking a bus from Pai to Koh Chang, train to Bangkok, bus to Trat, and ferry to Koh Chang. We were pretty late planning this and the night train was all booked up so we decided to take an overnight bus to Bangkok. Noom, the owner of Spicy Thai, told us what to do, got a guy to buy us tickets, and arranged everything. All in all it sounded pretty easy. But it turned out that not speaking the language in a foreign country does get difficult.
The bus from Pai to Chiang Mai was straightforward, just a reversal of our trip to Pai from Chiang Mai. When the bus arrived in Chiang Mai the driver pointed at a another mini bus and motioned for us to get in. We weren't sure where it was going but figured everything would work out. And it did - it took us to the bus station. We had a few hours to wait so enjoyed some delicious Thai bus station food (seriously, surprisingly good). The night bus was quite comfortable. I stayed up kind of late playing Civ Rev on my iPad so didn't get much sleep. Raph doesn't as sleep well on moving vehicles so had a worse time of it. Everything was pretty great until we arrived in Bangkok.
Thai buses stop at a few seemingly random spots along the way. I really could not figure out how those spots were chosen. When we booked the ticket it just said Bangkok. My best guess was that people told the driver where they really wanted to go, so the driver stopped there for them. Entering Bangkok we stopped at a couple random streets, some malls, and a market to drop off some people. Then at one of those random streets, the driver told us to get out. We asked "where are we?" and they said "Stop. No more." Raph and I looked at each other very confusedly and asked "Where is the station?" and they responded "No station. Stop here." And then they gave us our bags.
So, we were on a random street in Bangkok at 5am. Our directions told us to walk across the bus station at which we arrived and find the bus to Trat. But we hadn't prepared for how to actually get to the bus station. A similarly confused looking English speaking fellow told us he was looking for the bus station too so we found a taxi, told the driver "bus station" and shared the 45 minute taxi ride there.
This bus station was very large and laid out very differently from any bus station I'd ever seen. There were hundreds of booths, each labeled with different destinations, so we walked up and down the aisles looking for Trat. A helpful woman asked what we were looking for and when we said "Trat", she looked puzzled and asked someone in a booth. She said "Trang? Trang! Trang." so I showed her the word "Trat" on my phone. They asked some other booths and one of them apparently said to go downstairs as they pointed to the escalator downstairs. Downstairs was where people were lined up for buses and there were some tables with people selling tickets to places. All of these tables jumped on us and asked us where we wanted to go. We repeated "Trat. Koh Chang." and showed them the text on my phone when they didn't understand it. Each one looked confused at first and each one took us to a different table. We bounced between tables growing up a large entourage of guys trying to help us until one of them finally just said "150 baht" ($5) and put out his hand. We were very tired and confused but had no better ideas so just gave him the money, got tickets, and got into the minibus he took us to. We sat in the minibus for about 15 minutes wondering if we'd made a huge mistake as more people slowly got in until it was full. Whenever anyone got on, we asked "are you going to Trat?" and they just stared at us. Finally, a monk got on the minibus dressed in awesome bright orange and said "Yes. Trat."
This minibus took about three hours to travel through the traffic of Bangkok and stopped at another bus station. The driver pointed at a booth and said "Trat." It turned out we were at the wrong bus station to go to Trat and this was the correct one. So we bought tickets from that guy and had another two hours to kill. We ate a little bit, went to an internet cafe for an hour, and got back to that booth. We were on the new minibus for about six hours, making a stop halfway at a market where the driver got gas and we got snacks. A 23 year old half Thai, half Cambodian guy spoke good English and helped us figure out what was going on. At one point the minibus stopped and gave us our bags and told us to get on another one. Luckily, our new friend told us that we had to switch buses because we were going into a different province. It made a couple more random stops to drop off some people and finally dropped us at the ferry. The rest was pretty easy - the ferry was awesome and the songthaew (a group taxi adapted from a pickup truck) was painless. 31 hours after leaving, we arrived at the awesome hostel in Koh Chang, but that's a subject for the next post.
That was far too much text so here's some pictures of the ferry. I didn't manage to get pictures of any earlier part of the journey, though they wouldn't have been very interesting anyway.
And this is some people on our songthaew. The guy standing in the back is straddling a bag tied to the ladder carrying a live chicken. We dropped that off at a restaurant along the way.
