Saturday, November 17, 2007
Sunday, 10.28: Chiang Mai to Ko Lanta
Sunday was our designated travel day, set aside for the purpose of getting from the northern, mountainous end of the country to the beaches down south. By my estimation, we should have arrived at our resort in Ko Lanta at around 5:00 in the evening, just in time to see the sun set over the ocean and cap off the day with a relaxing drink. But then, what fun would it be if everything went according to plan?
At 6:00 a.m., Bri’s cell-phone alarm sounded in our dark room in Chiang Mai. Honestly, I don’t know if I was grumpy about having to get up so early after a terrible night’s sleep or relieved to finally be leaving the horrible Eagle Guest House behind—I suspect it was a little of both. Once we were both dressed and packed, we headed out into the relative quiet of early-morning Chiang Mai to flag down a tuk-tuk to take us to the airport. The first difference between Thai airports and their American counterparts was apparent the moment we stepped in the door: In Thailand, you have to go through a security checkpoint before you can even set foot inside the terminal. However, unlike the three-ring circus that American security checkpoints have become, theirs are still fairly simple: Just put your bag through the X-ray, walk through the metal detector and go. Our check-in at the Air Asia counter was just as effortless, and soon we had our boarding passes (which were little more than receipts) in hand and headed over to 94 Coffee to get some breakfast.
The rest of the boarding process was just as efficient as check-in had been—as a frequent American flyer, I was particularly impressed with how quickly and easily all of the Thai people seemed to board the plane. There was none of the dawdling in the aisles and fiddling with carry-on baggage that seems to make the boarding on most American flights take forever. Despite Air Asia’s notoriously bad on-time record, our 8:20 flight left Chiang Mai right on schedule and arrived in Bangkok just over an hour later. The bad news was that, since I had built in a sizeable cushion for our layover time in Bangkok (which was a good idea—although our flight arrived on time, the new airport is so massive that we never would’ve made the connection to the earlier Krabi flight), we had to sit and wait for about 30 minutes before we could even check in. Once we did, we headed downstairs to grab some lunch before making our way to the gate.
The one famous Thai dish that neither of us had tried yet was mango and sticky rice, so when we saw a picture of it outside one of the airport restaurants, our decision about where to eat was made. We both got bowls of spicy coconut chicken soup and an order of the sticky rice for dessert. Considering our airport location, the food was delicious (especially the sticky rice—I’m salivating right now, just thinking about it), but after spending a few days in Chiang Mai, we were in for some sticker shock when the bill came. After lunch, we did a little shopping in the stores just outside our gate, where we bought a couple of magazines (Spin for Bri, a hilarious British tabloid for me) to read while we were waiting for our plane. During the wait, I also tried to call a couple of the resorts we had scoped out before we left to see if they had any rooms available and could pick us up where the minivan would drop us off. I couldn’t get through to the resort we liked best, Baan Phu Lae, so I tried our second choice, Bamboo Bay, which was located next door. The woman I spoke to assured me that they did have a fan room available, so I told her that we would be there around 5.
However, we soon learned that our flight had been delayed about an hour. Fortunately, there was a pretty entertaining women’s boxing match playing on the flat-screen TV by our gate, so that kept us entertained until it was time to board. While getting onto the plane, we happened to be in line next to a young couple, who asked if we knew how to get to Ao Nang. Even though we weren’t going there, I thought I remembered from my research that it was only accessible by boat from Krabi, and told them so. After we were seated, though, I decided to verify this information in Bri’s Rough Guide. The Rough Guide confirmed that, indeed, the only way to get to Ao Nang was to take a boat from the main pier in Krabi. It also said that the only way to get from the airport to the pier (which was also close to the 7-Eleven where my Let’s Go guide had told me the minivans departed) was to take a taxi, at a flat fee of 350 baht (about $10). To Bri and I, already suffering from what I like to call Southeast Asia Sticker Shock Syndrome, this was an exorbitant amount of money to pay for a taxi (never mind that, less than a week earlier, we’d paid 5 times that amount to get to Dulles), and we decided to see if the couple we’d talked to earlier would share a taxi with us. Of course, we assumed that all the backpackers on our plane would be armed with the same information and would also be trying to procure a taxi share, so we made a beeline for the couple as soon as we got to baggage claim. I explained the situation, and they agreed to share a taxi with us, but said they wanted to stop by the tourist information booth first.
I’m not sure where I gathered the idea that all travel agents and/or tourist information stands in Thailand are complete rip-offs, but let’s just say that by that time, this idea was firmly implanted in my mind, so Bri and I hung back and waited while the couple visited the information booth. They came back a few minutes later and told us that they were taking a bus straight to Ao Nang and therefore wouldn’t need to share a taxi. I shrugged skeptically, and we made our way toward the exit. By this time, most of the backpackers had dispersed, so Bri and I decided to just go outside to the taxi queue and see if we could find anyone there who would be willing to share. One problem, though: There was no taxi queue. In fact, there seemed to be no taxis anywhere in the immediate vicinity. After talking with a couple of American guys who seemed equally confused about the transportation options, I decided to go back inside to check on the bus the couple had taken, leaving Bri outside with the bags so we wouldn’t have to put them back through the X-ray machine.
At the shuttle bus stand, I found that we could take the same shuttle bus to the pier at Krabi for 90 baht each…funny how that wasn’t mentioned in the guidebooks, huh? I bought our tickets, and we boarded the crowded bus, which took off just moments after we got on. When we arrived in downtown Krabi, I was ready to jump off the bus and start making our way to the minivan departure point at the 7-Eleven. Only before we could take more than two steps, we were accosted by a travel agent who asked where we were going. I tried to just ignore her and walk away, but Bri told her we were going to Ko Lanta, and she said that she could sell us a ticket on a minivan for 350 baht each. My suspicion was already raised by the mere fact that she was a travel agent, and the fact that our books had quoted the price for minivan tickets at 250 baht pretty much cemented my ill will toward this lady. Even though this was a difference of only $3 or so, I had recently realized how much we’d gotten ripped off on our tuk-tuk ride the previous night in Chiang Mai, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. But the travel agent was persistent, telling Bri and me that the last minivan to Ko Lanta was leaving at 4:00, and since it was already 3:30, if we didn’t buy tickets now, we’d have to spend the night in Krabi. That was enough to convince Bri, and although I was still pretty skeptical, I finally relented and let the agent sell us what she claimed were the last two tickets to Ko Lanta that night. However, after we’d purchased the tickets, I insisted on using our 30-minute wait to try to find the 7-Eleven, just to prove that we’d been ripped off. However, before too long we were heading down the wrong street, and once we got back on the correct path, we realized that the 7-Eleven was much further away than it appeared to be on the map. I decided that it wasn’t worth the trek—even if we had been ripped off (which I was beginning to think we hadn’t been—the travel agent told us that 250 baht was last year’s price, which could have been true since we both had 2006 guidebooks), there wasn’t anything we could do about it anyway. After eating an ice cream bar from a nearby convenience store and seeing a pudgy Thai guy at the travel agent’s in a “Sex Instructor: First Lesson Free” T-shirt, I felt a lot better.
I felt better when we got into the minivan, too—it was just the two of us, the driver and another Thai guy, plus a German couple and their teenage daughter, which, although it seemed to belie the agent’s claim that we had snagged the last two minivan tickets, at least meant that the van wouldn’t be too crowded. But of course, this was the day when nothing was as it seemed, and we soon stopped to pick up four male backpackers, filling the van to capacity. Or so I thought. Shortly after we picked up the backpackers, the van pulled over on the side of the road, and two Thai Muslim women, one of which was carrying a small baby, squeezed in. So, to recap, in a relatively small van, we were carrying the driver, his friend, four backpackers, me, Bri, a German family, two Muslim women and a baby. It was clearly going to be a long ride, so I put on my iPod and settled in.
It was dark by the time we got to the first car ferry, and the driver motioned for everyone to get out of the van while we waited in line to get on. We hung out at a makeshift convenience store on the curb, where Bri and I struck up a conversation with the Canadian guy who had been sitting next to us in the van. We all got back in to drive onto the ferry, then piled back out as we crossed the water. Getting out of the crowded van seemed like a good decision until tons of black exhaust from the ferry began pouring out near where we were sitting, and Bri and I had to dart through the cars to the other side of the boat so we could breathe again. We finally docked on the other side of the bay and returned to the minivan for a short drive to the next car ferry.
Knowing that we were getting closer to Ko Lanta, I decided to call Bamboo Bay and see if I could arrange a place for them to pick us up. I spoke to the same woman as earlier, but this time she insisted on speaking to the driver so that she could tell him where to meet us. Given that we were sitting several seats back from him and that he was already driving erratically at best, I wasn’t sure it was a wise decision to just pass him our phone. I told her I didn’t think I could get him the phone, so she asked to speak to another Thai person in the van. I tapped the shoulder of the Thai guy sitting in front of me and pointed to the phone. He looked confused, so I pulled out the only Thai phrase my tired brain could muster: “Pasa angrit?” or “English?” He nodded, so I explained the situation to him and handed him the phone. He chatted in Thai for a few minutes, then handed the phone back to me. But when I put it up to my ear, there was no one there. I tried to ask him what the lady at Bamboo Bay had said about where we should be dropped off, but he just looked at me, confused. Even though our cell-phone battery was almost dead at that point, I had no choice but to call the lady at Bamboo Bay back and get the story from her, since clearly this guy either didn’t understand English or had no intention of helping me. When I spoke to her again, she immediately asked to speak to a Thai person. “I just put a Thai person on the phone with you—what did he say?” I asked. She responded by asking again to speak to a Thai person, and I repeated my inquiry. We went back and forth like this for a while before I realized that it wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I turned around and just handed the phone to the Muslim woman in the seat behind me. She chatted with the Bamboo Bay lady for a while before handing the phone back to me. Fortunately, the woman was still on the phone this time, and she told me that they would meet us at Lanta Sunset. Only my travel-addled, culture-shocked brain was so wracked at that point that she had to repeat it about 10 times before I could understand that the words she was saying were English and not Thai (and even then, I wasn’t completely sure). I was already at my wit’s end, so it didn’t make things any better when the four Thai people in the van, who up to that point had been pretty quiet, began talking loudly to each other and laughing. Given their liberal use of the word “farang,” I was pretty certain that I was the subject of their conversation.
While waiting for the second car ferry, Bri managed to cheer me up slightly by playing Abba and Britney Spears for me on her iPod, but my joy was short-lived when we finally landed on Ko Lanta. I still wasn’t sure that I had the correct name for our meeting spot, and as we dropped off the backpackers at their resort, I turned to the German family to ask where they were staying. They told me they’d booked at Baan Phu Lae through the travel agent, adding that the resort was picking them up. The fact that they seemed to be so confident about their meeting place only added fuel to my nerves, but I was calmed a little by the fact that, when I told the driver to drop us off at Lanta Sunset, he seemed to recognize this location. We drove a little further down the road before pulling beside, as far as I could tell, nothing that said Lanta Sunset. But maybe “Lanta Sunset” is a landmark only known to the locals, because the Bamboo Bay truck was definitely there. Bri and I climbed out of the van, claimed our luggage and got ready to drive off with the guys from Bamboo Bay…except the Germans had also gotten out of the van, claimed their luggage and were trying to get the Bamboo Bay guys to give them a ride, which they refused to do on the grounds that the Germans weren’t staying at Bamboo Bay. Which, although the resorts were right next to each other and they were going that way anyway, seemed pretty reasonable to me. Really, I was just pissed that after everything I had been through to try to arrange this ride back to the resort, the Germans were just going to swoop in and try to claim it, too, even though minutes before they had acted so sure about how they were getting to their resort. But my attempts to explain the subtle differences between the words “Baan Phu Lae” and “Bamboo Bay” (really, whose idea was it to give two resorts located right next to each other on a remote bay such similar names?) fell on deaf ears, as did the efforts of the Bamboo Bay guy (whose name I found out later was Siyan) to keep the Germans out of the truck. They just piled right in with their bags, so we had no choice but to take them with us.
Fortunately, a mile or so down the road, we spotted their actual transportation, so Siyan and Nik (who was driving our truck) transferred them into the Baan Phu Lae truck. After a quick stop at the 7-Eleven (during which I asked Siyan whether Thai people called 7-Eleven “Jet-Sip-Et” since those are the Thai words for seven and eleven; they do not), we finally arrived at Bamboo Bay at around 9:00. The lady I had talked to on the phone (whose name I either didn’t get or don’t remember) greeted us at the restaurant/reception area and immediately brought us plates of shrimp fried rice (and a beer for me), which were quite welcome considering that our last meal had been way back at the Bangkok airport. Although I had asked for one of the 300-baht-a-night fan rooms when I had talked to her on the phone, she insisted on putting us in the 900-baht air-con version, explaining that the fan rooms were further up the hill and that we wouldn’t want to climb all the way up there. The price (around $26) seemed completely exorbitant to us after paying 240 baht (about $7) for our rooms in Chiang Mai (not to mention that we didn’t even want the air conditioning in the first place on account of Bri’s cold), but we were too exhausted to argue. Siyan and Nik helped us carry our bags up to the room, and Bri immediately fell into bed, while I plugged in the cell phone so we could call our parents and let them know that we’d arrived safely. But as soon as the phone began to charge, I noticed that we weren’t getting a signal. I let the battery fill up a little more, then unplugged the phone and took it down to the driveway to see if the signal would be better there. It was still nonexistent, so I walked over to the reception desk to see if I could find out what was going on. I had clearly interrupted Siyan and Nik’s bedtime preparations, as they were both only wearing towels when I arrived, but I knew I couldn’t go to bed without calling home first. Nik informed me that the SIM card we were using, Happy, did not get service in this part of Ko Lanta, but he told me I could use the resort phone to call and charge it to the room. I was a little worried about how much that would cost, but at that point, I didn’t have another choice. I gave him my parents’ number, and had a quick conversation with my mom to let her know that we were staying at Bamboo Bay, and that they would have to call us there if they wanted to reach us. By the time I got back up to the room and got ready for bed, Bri was already snoring away, so I took out my earplugs and tried to make the best of it. I managed to sleep pretty well until the light started to come up in the morning, and by then the combination of her snoring and the stuffiness of the room due to not being able to run the air conditioner or open the windows (there were no screens or mosquito netting) finally got to me, and I headed out to the balcony to doze for a few more hours. Once I got my first good look at the mist rising over the hills and the green sea rolling in over the rocks, I knew that all of the trouble to get to Ko Lanta had been worth it.
Continue to Day 8, Ko Lanta
Sunday was our designated travel day, set aside for the purpose of getting from the northern, mountainous end of the country to the beaches down south. By my estimation, we should have arrived at our resort in Ko Lanta at around 5:00 in the evening, just in time to see the sun set over the ocean and cap off the day with a relaxing drink. But then, what fun would it be if everything went according to plan?
At 6:00 a.m., Bri’s cell-phone alarm sounded in our dark room in Chiang Mai. Honestly, I don’t know if I was grumpy about having to get up so early after a terrible night’s sleep or relieved to finally be leaving the horrible Eagle Guest House behind—I suspect it was a little of both. Once we were both dressed and packed, we headed out into the relative quiet of early-morning Chiang Mai to flag down a tuk-tuk to take us to the airport. The first difference between Thai airports and their American counterparts was apparent the moment we stepped in the door: In Thailand, you have to go through a security checkpoint before you can even set foot inside the terminal. However, unlike the three-ring circus that American security checkpoints have become, theirs are still fairly simple: Just put your bag through the X-ray, walk through the metal detector and go. Our check-in at the Air Asia counter was just as effortless, and soon we had our boarding passes (which were little more than receipts) in hand and headed over to 94 Coffee to get some breakfast.
The rest of the boarding process was just as efficient as check-in had been—as a frequent American flyer, I was particularly impressed with how quickly and easily all of the Thai people seemed to board the plane. There was none of the dawdling in the aisles and fiddling with carry-on baggage that seems to make the boarding on most American flights take forever. Despite Air Asia’s notoriously bad on-time record, our 8:20 flight left Chiang Mai right on schedule and arrived in Bangkok just over an hour later. The bad news was that, since I had built in a sizeable cushion for our layover time in Bangkok (which was a good idea—although our flight arrived on time, the new airport is so massive that we never would’ve made the connection to the earlier Krabi flight), we had to sit and wait for about 30 minutes before we could even check in. Once we did, we headed downstairs to grab some lunch before making our way to the gate.
The one famous Thai dish that neither of us had tried yet was mango and sticky rice, so when we saw a picture of it outside one of the airport restaurants, our decision about where to eat was made. We both got bowls of spicy coconut chicken soup and an order of the sticky rice for dessert. Considering our airport location, the food was delicious (especially the sticky rice—I’m salivating right now, just thinking about it), but after spending a few days in Chiang Mai, we were in for some sticker shock when the bill came. After lunch, we did a little shopping in the stores just outside our gate, where we bought a couple of magazines (Spin for Bri, a hilarious British tabloid for me) to read while we were waiting for our plane. During the wait, I also tried to call a couple of the resorts we had scoped out before we left to see if they had any rooms available and could pick us up where the minivan would drop us off. I couldn’t get through to the resort we liked best, Baan Phu Lae, so I tried our second choice, Bamboo Bay, which was located next door. The woman I spoke to assured me that they did have a fan room available, so I told her that we would be there around 5.
However, we soon learned that our flight had been delayed about an hour. Fortunately, there was a pretty entertaining women’s boxing match playing on the flat-screen TV by our gate, so that kept us entertained until it was time to board. While getting onto the plane, we happened to be in line next to a young couple, who asked if we knew how to get to Ao Nang. Even though we weren’t going there, I thought I remembered from my research that it was only accessible by boat from Krabi, and told them so. After we were seated, though, I decided to verify this information in Bri’s Rough Guide. The Rough Guide confirmed that, indeed, the only way to get to Ao Nang was to take a boat from the main pier in Krabi. It also said that the only way to get from the airport to the pier (which was also close to the 7-Eleven where my Let’s Go guide had told me the minivans departed) was to take a taxi, at a flat fee of 350 baht (about $10). To Bri and I, already suffering from what I like to call Southeast Asia Sticker Shock Syndrome, this was an exorbitant amount of money to pay for a taxi (never mind that, less than a week earlier, we’d paid 5 times that amount to get to Dulles), and we decided to see if the couple we’d talked to earlier would share a taxi with us. Of course, we assumed that all the backpackers on our plane would be armed with the same information and would also be trying to procure a taxi share, so we made a beeline for the couple as soon as we got to baggage claim. I explained the situation, and they agreed to share a taxi with us, but said they wanted to stop by the tourist information booth first.
I’m not sure where I gathered the idea that all travel agents and/or tourist information stands in Thailand are complete rip-offs, but let’s just say that by that time, this idea was firmly implanted in my mind, so Bri and I hung back and waited while the couple visited the information booth. They came back a few minutes later and told us that they were taking a bus straight to Ao Nang and therefore wouldn’t need to share a taxi. I shrugged skeptically, and we made our way toward the exit. By this time, most of the backpackers had dispersed, so Bri and I decided to just go outside to the taxi queue and see if we could find anyone there who would be willing to share. One problem, though: There was no taxi queue. In fact, there seemed to be no taxis anywhere in the immediate vicinity. After talking with a couple of American guys who seemed equally confused about the transportation options, I decided to go back inside to check on the bus the couple had taken, leaving Bri outside with the bags so we wouldn’t have to put them back through the X-ray machine.
At the shuttle bus stand, I found that we could take the same shuttle bus to the pier at Krabi for 90 baht each…funny how that wasn’t mentioned in the guidebooks, huh? I bought our tickets, and we boarded the crowded bus, which took off just moments after we got on. When we arrived in downtown Krabi, I was ready to jump off the bus and start making our way to the minivan departure point at the 7-Eleven. Only before we could take more than two steps, we were accosted by a travel agent who asked where we were going. I tried to just ignore her and walk away, but Bri told her we were going to Ko Lanta, and she said that she could sell us a ticket on a minivan for 350 baht each. My suspicion was already raised by the mere fact that she was a travel agent, and the fact that our books had quoted the price for minivan tickets at 250 baht pretty much cemented my ill will toward this lady. Even though this was a difference of only $3 or so, I had recently realized how much we’d gotten ripped off on our tuk-tuk ride the previous night in Chiang Mai, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. But the travel agent was persistent, telling Bri and me that the last minivan to Ko Lanta was leaving at 4:00, and since it was already 3:30, if we didn’t buy tickets now, we’d have to spend the night in Krabi. That was enough to convince Bri, and although I was still pretty skeptical, I finally relented and let the agent sell us what she claimed were the last two tickets to Ko Lanta that night. However, after we’d purchased the tickets, I insisted on using our 30-minute wait to try to find the 7-Eleven, just to prove that we’d been ripped off. However, before too long we were heading down the wrong street, and once we got back on the correct path, we realized that the 7-Eleven was much further away than it appeared to be on the map. I decided that it wasn’t worth the trek—even if we had been ripped off (which I was beginning to think we hadn’t been—the travel agent told us that 250 baht was last year’s price, which could have been true since we both had 2006 guidebooks), there wasn’t anything we could do about it anyway. After eating an ice cream bar from a nearby convenience store and seeing a pudgy Thai guy at the travel agent’s in a “Sex Instructor: First Lesson Free” T-shirt, I felt a lot better.
I felt better when we got into the minivan, too—it was just the two of us, the driver and another Thai guy, plus a German couple and their teenage daughter, which, although it seemed to belie the agent’s claim that we had snagged the last two minivan tickets, at least meant that the van wouldn’t be too crowded. But of course, this was the day when nothing was as it seemed, and we soon stopped to pick up four male backpackers, filling the van to capacity. Or so I thought. Shortly after we picked up the backpackers, the van pulled over on the side of the road, and two Thai Muslim women, one of which was carrying a small baby, squeezed in. So, to recap, in a relatively small van, we were carrying the driver, his friend, four backpackers, me, Bri, a German family, two Muslim women and a baby. It was clearly going to be a long ride, so I put on my iPod and settled in.
It was dark by the time we got to the first car ferry, and the driver motioned for everyone to get out of the van while we waited in line to get on. We hung out at a makeshift convenience store on the curb, where Bri and I struck up a conversation with the Canadian guy who had been sitting next to us in the van. We all got back in to drive onto the ferry, then piled back out as we crossed the water. Getting out of the crowded van seemed like a good decision until tons of black exhaust from the ferry began pouring out near where we were sitting, and Bri and I had to dart through the cars to the other side of the boat so we could breathe again. We finally docked on the other side of the bay and returned to the minivan for a short drive to the next car ferry.
Knowing that we were getting closer to Ko Lanta, I decided to call Bamboo Bay and see if I could arrange a place for them to pick us up. I spoke to the same woman as earlier, but this time she insisted on speaking to the driver so that she could tell him where to meet us. Given that we were sitting several seats back from him and that he was already driving erratically at best, I wasn’t sure it was a wise decision to just pass him our phone. I told her I didn’t think I could get him the phone, so she asked to speak to another Thai person in the van. I tapped the shoulder of the Thai guy sitting in front of me and pointed to the phone. He looked confused, so I pulled out the only Thai phrase my tired brain could muster: “Pasa angrit?” or “English?” He nodded, so I explained the situation to him and handed him the phone. He chatted in Thai for a few minutes, then handed the phone back to me. But when I put it up to my ear, there was no one there. I tried to ask him what the lady at Bamboo Bay had said about where we should be dropped off, but he just looked at me, confused. Even though our cell-phone battery was almost dead at that point, I had no choice but to call the lady at Bamboo Bay back and get the story from her, since clearly this guy either didn’t understand English or had no intention of helping me. When I spoke to her again, she immediately asked to speak to a Thai person. “I just put a Thai person on the phone with you—what did he say?” I asked. She responded by asking again to speak to a Thai person, and I repeated my inquiry. We went back and forth like this for a while before I realized that it wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I turned around and just handed the phone to the Muslim woman in the seat behind me. She chatted with the Bamboo Bay lady for a while before handing the phone back to me. Fortunately, the woman was still on the phone this time, and she told me that they would meet us at Lanta Sunset. Only my travel-addled, culture-shocked brain was so wracked at that point that she had to repeat it about 10 times before I could understand that the words she was saying were English and not Thai (and even then, I wasn’t completely sure). I was already at my wit’s end, so it didn’t make things any better when the four Thai people in the van, who up to that point had been pretty quiet, began talking loudly to each other and laughing. Given their liberal use of the word “farang,” I was pretty certain that I was the subject of their conversation.
While waiting for the second car ferry, Bri managed to cheer me up slightly by playing Abba and Britney Spears for me on her iPod, but my joy was short-lived when we finally landed on Ko Lanta. I still wasn’t sure that I had the correct name for our meeting spot, and as we dropped off the backpackers at their resort, I turned to the German family to ask where they were staying. They told me they’d booked at Baan Phu Lae through the travel agent, adding that the resort was picking them up. The fact that they seemed to be so confident about their meeting place only added fuel to my nerves, but I was calmed a little by the fact that, when I told the driver to drop us off at Lanta Sunset, he seemed to recognize this location. We drove a little further down the road before pulling beside, as far as I could tell, nothing that said Lanta Sunset. But maybe “Lanta Sunset” is a landmark only known to the locals, because the Bamboo Bay truck was definitely there. Bri and I climbed out of the van, claimed our luggage and got ready to drive off with the guys from Bamboo Bay…except the Germans had also gotten out of the van, claimed their luggage and were trying to get the Bamboo Bay guys to give them a ride, which they refused to do on the grounds that the Germans weren’t staying at Bamboo Bay. Which, although the resorts were right next to each other and they were going that way anyway, seemed pretty reasonable to me. Really, I was just pissed that after everything I had been through to try to arrange this ride back to the resort, the Germans were just going to swoop in and try to claim it, too, even though minutes before they had acted so sure about how they were getting to their resort. But my attempts to explain the subtle differences between the words “Baan Phu Lae” and “Bamboo Bay” (really, whose idea was it to give two resorts located right next to each other on a remote bay such similar names?) fell on deaf ears, as did the efforts of the Bamboo Bay guy (whose name I found out later was Siyan) to keep the Germans out of the truck. They just piled right in with their bags, so we had no choice but to take them with us.
Fortunately, a mile or so down the road, we spotted their actual transportation, so Siyan and Nik (who was driving our truck) transferred them into the Baan Phu Lae truck. After a quick stop at the 7-Eleven (during which I asked Siyan whether Thai people called 7-Eleven “Jet-Sip-Et” since those are the Thai words for seven and eleven; they do not), we finally arrived at Bamboo Bay at around 9:00. The lady I had talked to on the phone (whose name I either didn’t get or don’t remember) greeted us at the restaurant/reception area and immediately brought us plates of shrimp fried rice (and a beer for me), which were quite welcome considering that our last meal had been way back at the Bangkok airport. Although I had asked for one of the 300-baht-a-night fan rooms when I had talked to her on the phone, she insisted on putting us in the 900-baht air-con version, explaining that the fan rooms were further up the hill and that we wouldn’t want to climb all the way up there. The price (around $26) seemed completely exorbitant to us after paying 240 baht (about $7) for our rooms in Chiang Mai (not to mention that we didn’t even want the air conditioning in the first place on account of Bri’s cold), but we were too exhausted to argue. Siyan and Nik helped us carry our bags up to the room, and Bri immediately fell into bed, while I plugged in the cell phone so we could call our parents and let them know that we’d arrived safely. But as soon as the phone began to charge, I noticed that we weren’t getting a signal. I let the battery fill up a little more, then unplugged the phone and took it down to the driveway to see if the signal would be better there. It was still nonexistent, so I walked over to the reception desk to see if I could find out what was going on. I had clearly interrupted Siyan and Nik’s bedtime preparations, as they were both only wearing towels when I arrived, but I knew I couldn’t go to bed without calling home first. Nik informed me that the SIM card we were using, Happy, did not get service in this part of Ko Lanta, but he told me I could use the resort phone to call and charge it to the room. I was a little worried about how much that would cost, but at that point, I didn’t have another choice. I gave him my parents’ number, and had a quick conversation with my mom to let her know that we were staying at Bamboo Bay, and that they would have to call us there if they wanted to reach us. By the time I got back up to the room and got ready for bed, Bri was already snoring away, so I took out my earplugs and tried to make the best of it. I managed to sleep pretty well until the light started to come up in the morning, and by then the combination of her snoring and the stuffiness of the room due to not being able to run the air conditioner or open the windows (there were no screens or mosquito netting) finally got to me, and I headed out to the balcony to doze for a few more hours. Once I got my first good look at the mist rising over the hills and the green sea rolling in over the rocks, I knew that all of the trouble to get to Ko Lanta had been worth it.
Continue to Day 8, Ko Lanta
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