Night Bus

January 19th and 20th

We shuffle quickly across a busy road with our bags and packs and pick our way through street stands, parked cars and sidewalk restaurants to the Lomprayah bus/ferry office two blocks down a narrow crowded street. We hope there are still seats left for the 9:30pm bus and ferry ride to Koh Phangan Island. We arrive to find a line out the door and a cluster of travelers surrounding piles of luggage. We make our own pile and Mitch gets in line.

Mitch emerges eventually with stickers for each of us: red squares for the bus, orange circles for the ferry. We affix them to our shirts feeling a bit like we are on some twisted late night elementary school field trip and haul our bags to a large, concrete median to wait. A rat entertains us by periodically emerging from underneath an iron grill to search for tasty morsels left behind.

The red sticker people are the last to board. After our luggage disappears into the hold below, we board our double-decker bus with faded purple upholstery and matching scalloped, fringed drapery in the windows.

The bus soon pulls out and a really bad Angelina Jolie movie starts playing that turns out to be rated R and I am soon flinging the complementary blankets over the kids’ heads during the racy parts. Luckily, we can’t hear it but we discovered long ago that dialogue is not an essential part of comprehension when watching an action thriller. Bjorn and Emma happily watched movies in Turkish when traveling the buses in Turkey. After the scene where Angelina shoots out the windshield of her car so she can crawl out and lay down face up on the hood of the vehicle and shoot the pursuing car while steering her own car with her feet, we doze off to a fitful sleep.

At 1:30 am, the lights come on and the bus driver makes a lengthy announcement in Thai. We’re at one of those roadside oases that cater only to buses. They are common to long haul buses the world over. My favorite was in Morocco where they served freshly made Moroccan pancakes with honey and coffee. The worst, was a stop in Egypt that was home to toilets we dubbed, “the worst bathrooms on the trip”. As we left them, Emma said, “At least there wasn’t much light.”

We decline to investigate the bus stop preferring our not-so-cozy seats. We get two more hours of sleep on the bouncy upper deck before the lights come on again and loud thai music blares on the loudspeaker for 30 minutes to make sure we are completely awake when the bus arrives at the ferry pier at 4:30 pm. We stumble out and retrieve our luggage from the underbelly of the bus and find a table while we wait for the sun to rise and the ferry to depart at 7 am. It is somewhere around this time that Mitch and I decide that we will avoid any future travel that requires a night bus journey.

The sun rises and we find ourselves on a beautiful white sand beach looking at an impossibly long dock
that leads to the waiting ferry. Walking down it feels a bit like one of those movies where the hero falls after the rotting plank breaks. But the planks hold and we walk onto the ferry where we get the best sleep of the journey.

We arrive at the pier in Thongsala at 11am the morning after the famous Koh Phangan full moon party. A few young folks wander around in day glow paint looking a bit sleepy, but thankfully it is all over. We board a taxi to the east shore. The driver straps our bags to the top and we squeeze onto the board seats in back with 5 other travelers for the 45 minute ride on steep, bumpy roads with pot holes and narrow stream crossings to the Dolphin Bungalows.

We walk out onto the beautiful sand beach rimmed by steep palm covered hills and it is all worthwhile. The awful bus ride quickly becomes a distant memory and an amusing story.
-Margit