Middle East 08

I’m not sure at what point the “authorities” decide not to chance sea transport on days when the waves are over 5 feet, and there is no “code” so to speak for any vessel to pass before attempting to transport nice, innocent passengers from one Thai island to another point, but if it wasn’t yesterday, I don’t think they do. I think it’s just “chance”.

 I have never been more scared in my entire life then I was yesterday.  During this trip, I have been plagued with sea sickness, and, for avid readers, they may call back to a prior post from Turkey where I was plagued with “sea legs” for a few days after getting off the cruise.  I found something to overcome both of these ailments.  Being scared out of my pants.

In order to save money and not pay for accomodation for the night, we decided to take the afternoon boat from Koh Tao back to Chumphon, where we would there pick up an overnight bus (8 hours) back to Bangkok. Now, in a further attempt to save money, we choose the cheap boat. You know, the one made with what appeared to be popsicle sticks and either spit or gum.

We board the boat, knowing that the weather sucks and it will be a little choppy.  It had been overcast and yucky the 5 days we were on the island, which brought out the ants, which is a whole other blog entry in itself.

So we’re on the boat, there are probably 35 or so people plus backpacks. The boat is rocking back and forth and i’m like, okay, i’ll probably vomit, but we’ll be kosher.

The boat not only went back and forth, but up and down, and people are screaming, i’m white knuckled holding the seat in front of me, the boat is going everywhere, a thai guy is passing out plastic bags for everyone to vomit in, and we hear it (vomitting) all over the boat, and it’s a small boat that I am CONVINCED is either tipping over, or breaking in half. 

As you can probably guess, we made it safely, but I am not lying when I say I’ve never been more scared in my life.

We arrive in Chumphon, where we had been a week before after a series of bad decisions involving travel (We stayed in Ao Nang for one night, then took a bus to Krabi, where we took a bus to Phuket (thus backtracking completely) only to arrive and see that it’s raining and decide to leave on the next bus out of there which was to Chumphon, which I thought was Cha-am, and arrive in a creepy city at 1am after another 13 hour bus ride and no idea why we’re there, hence the trip to Koh Tao in the first place). 

Anyway, we were obviously lied to when booking, because we didn’t get free transfer to town to get dinner, we got cold overpriced fried rice at the port. We then had to wait for 3 hours for the overnight bus, which was uneventful, other than the fact that the driver never took his (lead) foot off the gas and we got here at 4:30am instead of 6am and the driver was 45 minutes late picking us up.

So, here I am, safe again in Bangkok, eager for cheap internet to get some news, cheap food, cheap everything. That concludes my stays on islands for this trip. And, I have to say, I am in absolutely no hurry to ever get on a boat again.

Lastly, I haven’t had enough time to resize my pictures and add them to the blog, so, if anyone is interested, let me know and I can send a link to pictures.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 8:43 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.