I can honestly think of only a select few moments in my life
that were more joyous than the moment when our overnight boat journey came to a
rest in the port city of Surat Thani at 5am.
In the true nature of Thailand though, this joy was short-lived as it
was interrupted by people screaming everywhere for various bus companies that
were looking to take weary travelers onto their next destination. A couple of chaotic minutes later, we located
our "bus wrangler dude" who seemed friendly enough at first. His attitude quickly changed for the worse
though as he loaded us into the back of a pickup truck with a ton of other
travelers and piled our luggage on top of us (this was becoming a far too
common occurrence for Colleen and I!).
We were crammed so tight that I was actually hanging over the tailgate
of the truck with luggage piled on top of me as we careened through the morning
streets en route to the shitty bus depot where we would have to wait a few
hours for our connecting bus to the city of Krabi.
The bus depot was a poor excuse for a transportation hub,
made even sadder by the presence of 30-odd people who had just gotten off the
worst boat ride since Walt Disney decided that "It's A Small World"
would be a suitable attraction for families.
We bided our time at the bus depot by doing our best to avoid paying to
use their bathrooms or electrical outlets (ridiculous) and by watching the
Canadian travesty known as "Murdoch Mysteries" (torturous) on the
lone-fuzzy TV they had propped up.
Thankfully, our bus did eventually show up and three hours later we were
in Krabi. The only problem now was that
the bus had dropped us off quite far from the airport, so we had to enlist the
services of a taxi to get us to the airport.
Our hour-and-a-half flight to Singapore on Tiger Airways was
pretty standard stuff, save for the fact that while we were airborne I started
having large amounts of a gooey liquid pouring out of my ear. I assumed that this was some sort of side
effect from the scuba diving and I had hoped it would pass (more on that
debacle in the coming days).
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| We made it to Singapore. Definitely calls for a selfie....or whatever you would call this. |
Touching down in Singapore, it was clear that we weren't in
Thailand anymore. Things just instantly
seemed much more orderly and "first-world", although I am sure our
wallets would feel the effect of this orderliness. Thankfully at the airport we had a bit of
Thai money left that we were able to change for Singaporean dollars as none of
our four bank cards were working at the cash machines in the airport. We luckily had just enough money to pay for a
shuttle to our hotel, and alas our 20 hour journey from Koh Tao, Thailand to
Singapore was complete. Our journey,
with prices per person for the crazy two days of travel was as follows:
Pickup at hotel in Koh
Tao (included with boat ticket) > Night boat from Koh Tao to Suratthani
($20, 8.5 hours) > Shuttle to bus
depot (included with bus ticket) > Bus to Krabi ($5, 3 hours) > Taxi from
Krabi bus terminal to airport ($7) > Flight from Krabi, Thailand to
Singapore ($86, 1.5 hours) > Shuttle from airport to hotel ($9). TOTAL
TRAVEL TIME OF 2O HOURS. TOTAL COST OF $127 PER PERSON.
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| Days Hotel, back to Colleen's preferred style of travel. |
Our hotel in the super expensive city-state of Singapore was
a fairly new property, the Days Hotel at Zhongshan Park. Because of its relative newness and the fact
that it was not right in the heart of the central business district, we were
able to secure a fairly decent room rate by the city's standards. Our hotel
room was beautiful and immaculate, a far cry from the $20 a night bungalow we
were previously staying in that came complete with no TV, rolling blackouts,
and dodgy hot water. That night we were
super exhausted so we didn't do too much, just lounged about and attempted to
catch up on our sleep . We went for
dinner at the hotel restaurant, where our $70 meal sent us crashing back to earth
and reminded us that we weren't in Thailand anymore. Oh well, at least I wouldn't have to worry
about ants carrying me away in my sleep.
Now I just had to worry about my constantly leaking ear that appeared to
show no signs of slowing up on the oozing front.
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| The view from our hotel of the super-intensely populated Singapore. |
~Brentski~
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