Due to a broken phone charger and desire not to lose my digital camera to the Gulf of Thailand, I have no photos of this little stretch of the journey. As such, all photos in the next couple of posts are either stock images or are taken from news articles etc.
If you’ve done any amount of travel in south east Asia, you’ll know these types of minibus rides well. The vehicle seems to have one row of seats too many for its size, and is uncomfortably cramped for most westerners. I’m not overly tall myself, but all of my height is in my legs, so these minibuses mean a good few hours with my knees digging into the seat in front.
I was fully aware though that as a backpacker paying tiny amounts in my own currency to travel across a border and for hundreds of kilometres afterwards, a bit of discomfort with the legroom was something to be embraced as part of the experience.
For the most part I kept to myself on the minibus, making good use of my fully charged iPod to zone out and appreciate the scenery out the window.
There was one German girl who seemed to be peaking a bit too early in her Full Moon Party excitement, getting a bit too rowdy on the bus with more energy than the rest of the passengers combined.
She pissed me off a bit when we stopped somewhere in Southern Thailand for food at a roadside eatery, as she went off on a tangent when the vendors couldn’t speak English. In a tourist hotspot I’d maybe be able to empathise with her just a little, but this joint was in the middle of nowhere, and it really wasn’t that hard to point and pick the dish you wanted from the three on offer. My headphones went straight back in once back on the minibus and she ranted to anyone who’d listen about her stressful ordeal.
The real excitement on the minibus segment of this journey for me though came at the Malaysia-Thailand border.
As I would eventually learn was the norm at land borders in the region, it was pretty chaotic.
Undefined queues that looked vaguely like they were split into Thai/ASEAN/others but with no actual directions, less than half of the immigration counters staffed and each one stamping passports at a snail's pace.
I hedged my bets and joined a queue with a lot of other pale faces, and scribbled my details down onto my arrivals card while edging towards the counter.
When I got up there I assumed it’d be a smooth stamp and go. I had a visa already and Thailand generally keeps things pretty easy for idiot tourists like me, happy to make things simple and ensure a steady flow of return visitors leaving their tourist dollars in the kingdom.
The immigration guy gave me a bewildered look on reviewing my arrival card, handed it back to me inside my passport, and gestured toward the direction in which everyone was leaving, down a footpath that ran alongside the immigration offices. He didn’t speak English (I looked back to see if the girl from the bus was in the same queue…) so I was left to interpret for myself, but figured if he pointed towards the exit, I was all clear.
I walked off towards the minibus, where our driver and a few others who got through ahead of me were waiting. We started chatting about the queues and chaos, and I flicked through my passport to check out the fresh stamp, as I habitually do in excitement every time I cross a border.
After the first look I didn’t see it, which was odd as there were far more empty pages than stamped at that point so it shouldn’t have been hard to find. I looked again...nothing.
What the fuck? Getting nervous at this point, I studied each page forensically and...nope. No stamp.
Shit.
Had I just unknowingly crossed the border illegally? Admittedly only by about 10 metres, but across the border is across the border. Only the day before I’d read a news article about people who got lost in Phuket airport due to some renovations, and managed to bypass immigration somehow. Turning themselves in a day or two later when they realised what had happened, they still found themselves deported despite self reporting their error. I wasn’t really willing to have the same fate befall me, so made a very quick beeline to the office next to the counters where I thought I had just been cleared for entry.
I showed someone my passport and arrivals card, and explained how I got confused when the man on the desk only gestured towards the exit (right next to this office, I now realised) and I was quickly told that I’d just missed a section on the arrivals card - an address for my accommodation. I told them I left it blank because I couldn’t remember it, and couldn’t access wifi to check, but they told me it didn’t really matter, so long as it was filled in. I grabbed my Lonely Planet from my day pack and picked a random hostel address, wrote it in, and got back in the queue.
By the time I got to the front and cleared through, this time *with* a stamp in my passport, everyone else on the minibus was already there and waiting to get back on the road, so I felt a little guilty. Much more though I was just relieved that I did check my passport and had the chance to fix it before my entire trip turned to shit over a tiny misunderstanding.
Anyway, the rest of the minibus journey was otherwise uneventful, apart from the German passengers little tirade mentioned earlier. We passed through Hat Yai and dropped a few people off there, and reached Surat Thani in the evening just after dark. It was here where we received our tickets and pillows for the ferry onwards to Koh Pha Ngan.
Hang on. Pillows?!
Yeah, it was an overnight ferry, taking a good 6-8 hours. Only no one had bothered to tell any of us that when we booked our travel. We all had accommodation booked for that night on Koh Pha Ngan, and had been looking forward to a comfortable bed after the full day of minibus travel, but turned out we’d be spending the night crammed in with hundreds of other backpackers on the hard, wooden floor of a slow ferry and arriving in the early hours of the morning.
In hindsight, this was hilarious and kind of quintessential to the backpacking experience, but at the time we were all just kind of tired and cranky. I found somewhere to get dinner and a couple of beers that I hoped might help me get off to sleep, and strolled back to the dock for boarding.
Getting on the ferry, I was taken aback by just how much it looked like we were going to be crammed in. There was no room for privacy overnight. The bigger groups travelling together had already grabbed the corners and other good spots, and I was left to place my bag and pillow down right in the middle of the deck, and hope those around me were friendly and not likely to steal from me while asleep, if I managed to sleep at all.
As the boat fired up and started pulling away, I got chatting to the guys around me. I’d managed to park myself in between two groups, one travelling together from Germany, and one a few guys from various Scandinavian countries who’d met on the road and were making the Full Moon Party backpacker pilgrimage together.
I had a quick conversation about football with the German lying next to me, before getting into one of those typical backpacker intro conversations you’ll have a million times (where from? How long travelling so far? Where next? Favourite place? Etc etc etc) with one of the Scandinavian guys. I tried to sleep after an hour or so, but spent much more time staring at the ceiling and the night sky across the starlit sea, listening to the low hum of the engines.
It was still very early when we disembarked onto Koh Pha Ngan, the first glimpse of light for the day and that early morning vibe that you usually only get at the airport when you’ve booked a cheap 5am domestic flight.
We all flowed off the ferry slowly and got onto songthaews (casual Thai public transport, a bit like a bus but you’re sitting in the back of a pickup truck), split by which part of the island we were staying on.
I got dropped off right on the main beach at Haad Rin, and after taking a quick peek at the gorgeous stretch of sand where the party would take place that night, allowed a motorbike taxi to overcharge me for what I didn’t yet realise was only a few hundred metres ride from there to my hostel.
The receptionist told me they were expecting me to arrive last night, I told her that I had expected to as well and thanked her for not cancelling my booking.
Now, sleep. Tomorrow (well, later that same day) promised to be a big one.