In the morning we
went to Jungle Juice for breakfast and then headed back to the
bungalows. Then, while I packed, Kate did something momentous,
creating an end for our thus-far-open-ended travels by purchasing
four tickets for flights from Bali to Sydney on 17 October. When I
brought all of the bags over, we piled them and us into the back of a
pick-up truck and got a lift up to the main road, where we set
ourselves up to wait for the local bus back to Surat Thani. While
Kate stood beside the road, waiting to flag the bus down, I noticed
some other tourists being dropped at a little minivan office nearby
and went over to enquire about the price. It proved to be pretty
cheap, and as there was a bus going right away – and we didn't know
when the local bus was due - we gabbed our stuff, bought some tickets
and climbed aboard.
The minivan dropped
us at the train station and we went inside and enquired about getting
tickets for the sleeper train down to Butterworth in Malaysia. The
good news was that there were plenty of berths available; the bad
news was that the train left at 1.26am – and it was then about
11am. There was a left luggage office in the station, so we dropped
our bags off and went to explore the surrounding town – hoping to
find a nice air-conditioned café whose wifi we could use to kill
some time and do a little bit more planning. As we walked out of the
station and across the road, Kate felt something wet on the back of
her leg and looked down to see a small dog licking her calf. The dog,
which the girls dubbed Cookie, proceeded to follow us wherever we
went for most of the rest of the day. The train station isn't
actually in Surat Thani, but in a smaller town called Phun Phin, a
very local, undeveloped little place that was singularly lacking in
nice air-conditioned cafés whose wifi we could use to kill some time
and do a little bit more planning. In fact it was pretty dead (it was
a Sunday) and seemingly devoid of anywhere nice to eat, but it did
have a park with some cool cement-and-tile picnic settings, and we
set ourselves up around one of these while I went to look for
something to have for lunch, Cookie curling up on the ground beside
us.
My end-to-end
exploration of the main street turned up a few minimarts, where I
picked up some tuna, bread and cucumbers, and a large bottle of cold
Coke, and some street vendors, where I got some noodles, pork and
soup in a bowl and some extremely nice grilled chicken. After lunch
we played some cards and Sarah finally brought to a close a game of
rummy we've been playing for weeks by being the first to reach 1,000
points. We then went for a bit of a walk around town, stopping for
some very refreshing iced coffees in a nice little air-conditioned
cake shop (if only it had wifi!).
As we sat, we could
see people setting up market stalls out on the main street and by the
time we re-emerged - Cookie getting up from outside the front door to
rejoin us - there was a proper night market getting underway. We
pottered around checking out the stalls for a while, buying some
cucumbers and a bra (and admiring a very ingenious pyramidal grill
set up being used by a few of the stall holders) and then went back
and sat in the park. As we had been walking down the main street,
some very large, very dark clouds had loomed up and over us, and now
the wind began to pick up in anticipation of a proper thunderstorm,
which duly broke over us. We quickly moved into a raised covered area
nearby, where we sat and watched a couple of guys playing chess (or
some sort of hybrid of chess – some of the pieces seemed to behave
quite strangely).
When the rain began
to ease off a little, I made my way back to the train station. Kate
and I had become progressively more worried that the left luggage
counter was going to shut with our bags inside, but when I got there
and enquired as to its opening hours, the woman said, 'Not close!',
which is very civilised of them. When I got back to the others to
deliver the good news, I was rather wetter than I was when I left –
although I had taken an umbrella, a truck had rendered the contents
of a large puddle airborne in my direction as I waited to cross a
road.
When the rain
stopped, Zoe and I ventured out to forage for food, returning with
three different types of chicken (claypot roasted soy, battered and
fried, and grilled – all of them delicious in their own special
ways) and some sticky rice, which we made pretty short work of. By
now we figured that we were ready to return to the station, and as we
made our way out of the little shelter, someone came over and
switched the lights off – they had left them on just for us!
We
wandered back and checked out a café at the end of the station
platform, but it charged for everything (charging devices, using wifi
and so on), so we made our way back onto the platform. When we got
there, we went straight to left luggage to retrieve our bags. And
just in time, too, as the staff were getting ready to go to sleep -
one woman lying on the floor, breast feeding her child, the other
climbing into a bed she had set up in one of the shelves. The
platform was pretty full, but we managed to find a spot to sit,
joining a group of very friendly locals – the granny kept giving
Zoe's arm a little stroke.
Time slowly slid by,
trains coming and going, the arrival of each announced by the ringing
of a large brass bell hanging near the ticket office. One of those
trains was a version of the Orient Express, which we all looked
longingly at as it stood for a while in the station. Through the
windows we could see all the old-world elegance you could ever wish
for, and as it pulled away, we saw three well-dressed passengers
enjoying cigars and red wine on the little open 'verandah' at the
back. Bastards. At 11pm, the ratio of whites to locals on the
platform suddenly increased as the café closed, but the platform
then gradually got emptier – the vast majority of the other
passengers, including pretty much all of the other white folks,
disappearing on trains heading back up to Bangkok.
The minutes seemed
to tick even more slowly past as we discovered that our train was
running 50 minutes late. Zoe had a bit of a sleep and when she woke
back up, Sarah took her turn. Meanwhile Kate and I watched some stray
dogs chase a rat across the tracks. And then, finally, at about
2.20am, the bell was rung and our train pulled up beside the
platform. We woke Sarah up, grabbed our bags, climbed aboard, quickly
found our berths, climbed in (Sarah and I on our own, Kate and Zoe
together) and slipped into blissful slumber.
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