Lee n Tan

We arrived in Bangkok at 5am. The road, as we neared the city just got busier and busier with utes fully loaded with goods for markets and also people heading to work (in the back of the utes). The bus station was another story that was just manic – people, taxi’s, tuk-tuk’s, buses all going every which way and every one of them honking horns, yelling etc.

The actual trip was quite good – well I thought it was, Lee didn’t sleep very well he ended up reading his book for the majority of the trip. We were given a styrofoam container not long into our trip filled with rice and a spicy sauce (something we didn’t need as we were so full). Shortly after our little bus boy (literally, he was a very small Thai man dressed in a very smart uniform) delivered bottles of water, after that some fruit juice then just after that another styrofoam box with sweet treats (chocolate etc). We definitely would not be going hungry!!

The lights were turned off about 20 minutes after he had made his final delivery and they played a movie on the TV, the only problem was it was in Thai but it was hilarious. It was about this baby that was born deformed and was literally thrown on the trash heap, you thought he was dead but then he opened his eyes!!! He grew up and started scaring all the town folk. The story jumped from him scaring everyone to the town folk sitting in the temple with the head monk re-living their stories of this creature and wanting him to believe them. The boy was Thai but had a large head, ghastly teeth, wide reddish eyes and white (powdered) skin. There was also a homeless crazy woman that made an appearance quite regularly as well. The story ended with a twist, they had a showdown with the creature and you found out that the homeless crazy woman was the mum and the father was the head monk. All that and not one word of English.

We hadn’t discussed any plans of where to go and what to do once we hit Bangkok so we took 5 and had a look through the LP (Lonely Planet). I had some idea of where I wanted to go so we went to the info booth to find out where to find the train station to take us down south.

About 30 minutes later we were in Bangkok train station trying to work out which booth to buy the ticket from (everything is in Thai). I found a very helpful info girl who sent me in the right direction. Another hurdle overcome we now had a ticket to Phetchaburi, 123km south of Bangkok, leaving at 8.05am. We had a bit of time to kill, so we pulled up some floor and sat back and read our books and I napped a little.

We went out onto the platform to wait for the train, it was very interesting watching people. There was this one white guy that looked very out of place he kept walking up and down the platform, smoking heaps of cigarettes and generally looking very agitated. He kept us entertained. The train was late so this made things very confusing. Trains arrived at our our platform and left again before our train had even arrived. So we all thought when one arrived that it was ours, then people in front found it was going north and to try and find out info was difficult because if the staff spoke any English it was not very good but we made it in the end.

I don’t think Phetchaburi isn’t a regular stop (or they forgot about us) as we were let off about 50m from the platform so we had to jump off the train. This proved quite difficult with a 16kg pack on your back!!

We grabbed a taxi and he dropped us in the middle of town at the most popular back packer place. We used their internet to find somewhere to stay. We ended up at Khao Wang Hotel just at the foot of a large hill funnily enough called Khao Wang. The hotel reminded me of a hospital as the hallways were really wide. We settled into our room had showers after 16+ hours of travel then slept for a few hours.

We had dinner at a locals joint just down the road and the food was fantastic, very basic but good! Boiled Chicken, Sweet Pork and Crispy Pork all with rice.