Saturday, November 17, 2007
Thursday, 11.1: Ko Lanta to Bangkok
Given my eagerness to get back to Bangkok, I wasn’t terribly grumpy about having to wake up at 6 the next morning to catch the ride that would take us to meet our minivan back into Krabi. I had settled my bill with Bamboo Bay the night before (it was less than $100, so fortunately I had enough cash on me to cover it), so I dropped off my key and headed over to Baan Phu Lae, where Bri was still getting ready and hadn’t yet paid her bill. Given that the kayak tour and most of our meals and drinks were on the Baan Phu Lae tab, we were a little nervous that we wouldn’t have enough cash to cover it. However, the Baan Phu Lae people assured us that our driver could take us by an ATM on the way to the minivan, and we could just give him the balance. Which is a good thing, because the total was way more than either of us had expected—just over 8,000 baht, or around $250. Such is the danger of charging things to the room. However, when we looked back over what all we’d done in the past three days, we agreed that $350 split between the two of us was a pretty good deal for our beach vacation.
Our minivan back to Krabi wasn’t nearly as crowded as the one there, but our driver was considerably more insane. When we got stuck in a long line at the first ferry, I was a little worried that we wouldn’t make it to the airport in time to catch our flight, but I needn’t have been, given that our driver was a speeding maniac. I saw him run at least two other cars off the road before I decided it would just be best to not pay too much attention and pray that we made it to the airport in one piece.
Which we did—although I can’t say the same for my backpack. When loading it onto the luggage cart outside the airport, I noticed a hole in one of the pockets that appeared to have been chewed by the mouse I’d seen exiting the previous night. Bri was still unconvinced, saying it had probably just ripped when being tossed on a flight, but when I reached into the pocket and pulled out a partially chewed deck of cards, it was pretty obvious that the mouse was the culprit. We could not get back to Bangkok fast enough.
While waiting for our luggage at the Bangkok airport, I put in a call to Refill Now, a brand-new hostel that I’d run across online that looked pretty cool. The guy I talked to assured me that they had a room available, so we hopped in a taxi and headed there. The hostel turned out to be exactly what I needed—clean and sparkling, with impeccable modern design. And the owners (two Japanese brothers who had previously lived in California) were wonderful, helping us get on the Internet (for the first time since we’d left Chiang Mai!) and showing us the best places to go shopping. I’d wanted to check out the boutiques at Siam Square (which is where all the students go to get trendy clothes), and they also suggested stopping by the Siam Paragon mall and then heading to the night bazaar at Lumphini Park, as we still had to stock up on a few more souvenirs for people back home.
The only downside to Refill Now was that it was located kind of out of the way in a residential neighborhood, which meant we had to take a taxi to the Skytrain station. But when we set off on our shopping expedition, we had the good luck of finding a taxi whose passengers were disembarking at the end of our street. Once we boarded the Skytrain, we recognized a girl from our hostel in the same car, and we chatted with her on the way to the Siam station. She ended up getting off the train with us, but we lost her in the crowds as we made our way down to the street.
I was looking for a soft T-shirt to wear on the plane home, and after meandering through the rows of boutiques for awhile, we came upon one that had neon-colored, graphic-printed tees on sale for 99 baht. We left Siam Square shortly thereafter, heading for the upscale Siam Paragon mall, where we thought we might be able to find some cheap noise-canceling headphones for the flight home. However, we took a wrong turn into the Siam Center mall (surely you can see how it would have been confusing), which seemed to be more of the same relatively expensive trendiness that we’d seen in Siam Square, so we didn’t browse too long. We did stop by Boots, where I picked up some much-needed after-sun lotion, and we also finally decided to see whether Black Canyon Coffee’s ludicrously high opinion of itself was deserved, which we quickly decided it was not. (And believe me, by that time, we’d had enough iced coffees and teas in various places in Thailand to make a well-informed decision.) We finally made it over to Siam Paragon, where we quickly deduced that everything in the mall was going to be way out of our budget (it was the floor of luxury-car dealerships that tipped us off), but we took advantage of the swanky mall location to use the restroom before heading over to the night bazaar at Lumphini Park.
Things at the night bazaar were much more in our price range (i.e., really freaking cheap, although not quite as cheap as the Saturday night market in Chiang Mai), so we spent quite a while wandering through the aisles, picking up our remaining souvenirs and stopping in every single shop selling funky T-shirts. (Our Engrish bag, combined with my T-shirt purchase earlier in the evening, had set of something of a Thai T-shirt obsession.) After we’d done a few laps of the bazaar and fortified ourselves with French fries and beer (embarrassingly American, yes, but at that point I think we’d had just about all the Thai food we could handle), we got in the taxi queue to get a ride back to Refill Now. Because the hostel’s location was so obscure, I had a map with me that I’d printed out before we left home. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to do much for our taxi driver…after scrutinizing it for a little while, he called the guy running the queue over to have a look at the map (borrowing his glasses in the process so he could get a better look at it). Finally they managed to figure out where we were going—well, sort of. In what would soon become standard for every taxi we took back to the hostel, our driver managed to find the main street it was off of, but not the side street it was actually on. So we’d have to do what we did that night: keep a lookout for the building as we drove down the street, and as soon as we saw it, yell for the driver to stop, get out of the taxi, and walk back down the street to the hostel. (Not the most perfect system, but it seemed easier than actually having to direct the driver to the hostel’s driveway.) It was pretty late by the time we got back, so we went right to sleep in preparation for our big day of Bangkok sightseeing the next day.
Continue to Day 12, Bangkok
Given my eagerness to get back to Bangkok, I wasn’t terribly grumpy about having to wake up at 6 the next morning to catch the ride that would take us to meet our minivan back into Krabi. I had settled my bill with Bamboo Bay the night before (it was less than $100, so fortunately I had enough cash on me to cover it), so I dropped off my key and headed over to Baan Phu Lae, where Bri was still getting ready and hadn’t yet paid her bill. Given that the kayak tour and most of our meals and drinks were on the Baan Phu Lae tab, we were a little nervous that we wouldn’t have enough cash to cover it. However, the Baan Phu Lae people assured us that our driver could take us by an ATM on the way to the minivan, and we could just give him the balance. Which is a good thing, because the total was way more than either of us had expected—just over 8,000 baht, or around $250. Such is the danger of charging things to the room. However, when we looked back over what all we’d done in the past three days, we agreed that $350 split between the two of us was a pretty good deal for our beach vacation.
Our minivan back to Krabi wasn’t nearly as crowded as the one there, but our driver was considerably more insane. When we got stuck in a long line at the first ferry, I was a little worried that we wouldn’t make it to the airport in time to catch our flight, but I needn’t have been, given that our driver was a speeding maniac. I saw him run at least two other cars off the road before I decided it would just be best to not pay too much attention and pray that we made it to the airport in one piece.
Which we did—although I can’t say the same for my backpack. When loading it onto the luggage cart outside the airport, I noticed a hole in one of the pockets that appeared to have been chewed by the mouse I’d seen exiting the previous night. Bri was still unconvinced, saying it had probably just ripped when being tossed on a flight, but when I reached into the pocket and pulled out a partially chewed deck of cards, it was pretty obvious that the mouse was the culprit. We could not get back to Bangkok fast enough.
While waiting for our luggage at the Bangkok airport, I put in a call to Refill Now, a brand-new hostel that I’d run across online that looked pretty cool. The guy I talked to assured me that they had a room available, so we hopped in a taxi and headed there. The hostel turned out to be exactly what I needed—clean and sparkling, with impeccable modern design. And the owners (two Japanese brothers who had previously lived in California) were wonderful, helping us get on the Internet (for the first time since we’d left Chiang Mai!) and showing us the best places to go shopping. I’d wanted to check out the boutiques at Siam Square (which is where all the students go to get trendy clothes), and they also suggested stopping by the Siam Paragon mall and then heading to the night bazaar at Lumphini Park, as we still had to stock up on a few more souvenirs for people back home.
The only downside to Refill Now was that it was located kind of out of the way in a residential neighborhood, which meant we had to take a taxi to the Skytrain station. But when we set off on our shopping expedition, we had the good luck of finding a taxi whose passengers were disembarking at the end of our street. Once we boarded the Skytrain, we recognized a girl from our hostel in the same car, and we chatted with her on the way to the Siam station. She ended up getting off the train with us, but we lost her in the crowds as we made our way down to the street.
I was looking for a soft T-shirt to wear on the plane home, and after meandering through the rows of boutiques for awhile, we came upon one that had neon-colored, graphic-printed tees on sale for 99 baht. We left Siam Square shortly thereafter, heading for the upscale Siam Paragon mall, where we thought we might be able to find some cheap noise-canceling headphones for the flight home. However, we took a wrong turn into the Siam Center mall (surely you can see how it would have been confusing), which seemed to be more of the same relatively expensive trendiness that we’d seen in Siam Square, so we didn’t browse too long. We did stop by Boots, where I picked up some much-needed after-sun lotion, and we also finally decided to see whether Black Canyon Coffee’s ludicrously high opinion of itself was deserved, which we quickly decided it was not. (And believe me, by that time, we’d had enough iced coffees and teas in various places in Thailand to make a well-informed decision.) We finally made it over to Siam Paragon, where we quickly deduced that everything in the mall was going to be way out of our budget (it was the floor of luxury-car dealerships that tipped us off), but we took advantage of the swanky mall location to use the restroom before heading over to the night bazaar at Lumphini Park.
Things at the night bazaar were much more in our price range (i.e., really freaking cheap, although not quite as cheap as the Saturday night market in Chiang Mai), so we spent quite a while wandering through the aisles, picking up our remaining souvenirs and stopping in every single shop selling funky T-shirts. (Our Engrish bag, combined with my T-shirt purchase earlier in the evening, had set of something of a Thai T-shirt obsession.) After we’d done a few laps of the bazaar and fortified ourselves with French fries and beer (embarrassingly American, yes, but at that point I think we’d had just about all the Thai food we could handle), we got in the taxi queue to get a ride back to Refill Now. Because the hostel’s location was so obscure, I had a map with me that I’d printed out before we left home. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to do much for our taxi driver…after scrutinizing it for a little while, he called the guy running the queue over to have a look at the map (borrowing his glasses in the process so he could get a better look at it). Finally they managed to figure out where we were going—well, sort of. In what would soon become standard for every taxi we took back to the hostel, our driver managed to find the main street it was off of, but not the side street it was actually on. So we’d have to do what we did that night: keep a lookout for the building as we drove down the street, and as soon as we saw it, yell for the driver to stop, get out of the taxi, and walk back down the street to the hostel. (Not the most perfect system, but it seemed easier than actually having to direct the driver to the hostel’s driveway.) It was pretty late by the time we got back, so we went right to sleep in preparation for our big day of Bangkok sightseeing the next day.
Continue to Day 12, Bangkok
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