The Amazing Race

Leaving Singapore, and unaware of it at the time, Janelle and I were about to begin on our longest journey yet. We were attempting to make it from Singapore to Ko Samui in Thailand in less than 48 hours. Leaving Spore at 1pm, would we be able to make it to that beautiful Thai island by the following night? Let's see what happens... The Amazing Race has begun!

We boarded our train and arrived back in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia just over seven hours later. Our train was late, and this left us with a very narrow time window to be able to being the second leg of the trip. Upon arriving at the station we had less than an hour to disembark from the first train, run up and buy tickets for the next one, eat dinner, change money over, and then get on the new train. With some mad running we managed to complete all of those tasks, and make it onto the second train leaving KL! Check Point #! We're still in the race!

This train was a sleeper train, and so Janelle and I settled in for our long ride into Thailand. Scheduled to be a 15-hour train ride, I wanted to try and sleep as much of it away as I could. I passed out in my bed and woke up the next morning just before immigration. We had to get off the train, go through Malaysian and Thai immigration, and then get back on the train again. Normally this is all a fairly quick procedure, but no one there seemed to have their shit together, and we all spent a lot of time just waiting on the train platform. Finally we had all been processed, and were back on the rails again, now in Thailand. Check Point #2!

We rolled into Hat Yai in southern Thailand about two hours late. It was now almost noon and the last ferry to Ko Samui left the coast - about 200 hundred kilometers to the north of where we were - at 6pm. Would we be able to make it? Here in Hat Yai we had our biggest roadblock to date - a nasty Thai lady at a shady travel agency. The Julie Cooper of Hat Yai, she was shrewd and greedy and when she looked at the two us with all our backpacks and desperate faces, all she saw were dollar signs to be made! She tried to sell us two bus tickets up to the ferry place for a 'special price' of 4000 baht! That's like a hundred bucks US!!! FUCK THAT, LADY! Hell, I could buy my own island in Thailand for that amount of money! When a 15 hour train ride costs less than twenty bucks, you can imagine the shock when you're offered a mere four-hour bus ride and short ferry hop for such a high price.

She tried to bargain us into buying those tickets, and was speaking a million miles a minute and kept trying to get us all worried that we'd miss the boat and that we had to 'leave right now!', but we weren't buying into her charade. No way we're gonna fork out that amount of cash! I'd rather lose our little race than give that greedy wench ten times the amount of money for what's fair! Sorry biatch, my sis and I have been around the Backpacker's Block more than a few times and we know what you're up to.

We ended up getting just basic bus transport to Surat Thani (ferry town) from her for 400 baht. Essentially the same journey, only minus the ferry ticket, for a tenth of the price. By the time the bus came by to pick us up it was 12:30pm. The clock was ticking. We just passed our first roadblock, but what would the delay cost us?

And of course our little minibus had to drive through every single street of Hat Yai to fill up the van before leaving. We cruised up and down through the city until all 11 seats were full, and then finally we were on the highway heading north. Less than four hours now. Tick tock tick tock tick tock...

A gas station stop later, plus a food/bathroom break, and then dropping every single passenger in the bus off before us, our bus driver arrived at the ferry pier....forty minutes after the last ferry had already left. NO!!!!! WE LOST THE RACE!!!! :-(

We were bummed to have missed the boat and to be stuck in Surat Thani overnight, but ahhhh well....can't say we didn't try. We bought our morning ferry ticket, checked into a hotel, and had some dinner. The next morning we caught the ferry and two and a half hours later arrived in Ko Samui. It was around 11am now, meaning that we've essentially been travelling for the last 46 hours. But hey, Ko Samui was bright and hot and gorgeous, and we had a white beach waiting for us.

We found a nice place to stay on the island, right in the main traveller's beach area, Chaweng, and made a b-line for the beach. Ko Samui is quite a large island, and it even has its own airport. This has made the island quite developed, and it was quite different from what I was expecting. The island resembled Bali a lot, with all of its stores and restaurants and bars, and all the Western chains, but it was not without its charm. The beach is long, and filled with the softest, whitest sand I've seen yet on this trip. It was like walking on silky powder. God, it was gorgeous! And with gentle breezes blowing in from off the Gulf of Thailand, it was so so comfortable there.

And then the weather changed.

After two days of beautiful sun, a mini-hurricane descended upon us and everything changed. It began to rain, no, POUR, the winds howled, and the surf rose and rose and rose. Soon enough that gorgeous beach was completely submerged under the pounding waves, which now reached all the way up to the edge of our bungalow's restaurant. So much for working on our tans!

Janelle and I weathered the storm as best we could, but after two days of cabin fever, and with our next destination supposed to be nearby Ko Tao, we decided to change plans. Knowing that if this weather kept up, we wouldn't be able to dive on world-renowned diving paradise Ko Tao anyway, so may as well skip across to the other coast. Hopefully we can find some sun there!

I was a bit disappointed to leave Ko Samui so soon, or rather with half our time being in the torrential rains, but hey you can't control the weather. At least we ate really well on Ko Samui. The island's got a lot of great restaurants, and it had actually stopped raining our last night in town so we went out for a special dinner. We went to a restaurant right next to the beach and had truly delicious seafood dinners. I had shark steak with a lemongrass cream sauce and it was so freaking yummy!!! A good way to end our stay on Samui. We'll head to Ko Phi Phi next, and hope that things are brighter over there.