Heading south today and I’m driving! Don’t get me wrong, I’ve driven all over Thailand and India on a motorbike, but I’ve never driven a car here, especially not a monster 4×4 and especially not around Bangkok.
After a Tuk Tuk ride, a boat trip along the Klongs, then a 15 stop ride on the BTS Skytrain, finally finishing up with a taxi for the last few miles, we ended up in a suburb of Bangkok, where the beast was parked. Naturally it had to be parked down a labyrinth of tiny Soi’s (road’s in Thai).
I booked the crossing to Koh Tao for tomorrow, but as the Catamaran leaves at the ungodly hour of 7 am, we are going to catch the 1pm crossing instead. The only down side is that the 1pm crossing is usually a speedboat seating a maximum of 15 people, as opposed to the catamaran’s four hundred.
I did actually take the speedboat the very first time I went to Koh Tao in 2001. At that time there was no catamaran, so it was the only way to go and boy was it bumpy. Koh Tao is about 65km from Chumphon on the mainland and so they do really have to put the foot down or you’d never get there. Even then the crossing still takes one and three quarter hours.
I’m hoping it was just a windy day last time and it will be smoother, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope!
Anyway, back to the drive. I managed to navigate my way around Bangkok without incident out on to the highway and was soon cruising south. Just like in the USA, there are some really big differences on the roads. For example every so often you have an option of a making a U turn, this is on the equivalent of a motorway, by the way. You turn off to the right from your fast lane onto the fast lane of the opposing carriageway! It seems to work and it sure saved them a lot of bridge building.
The other thing is that the speed limit is sometimes lane based, rather than road based. Which means that on a three lane motorway the inside lane will have a speed limit of 80Kmh, the middle lane 100Kmh and the outside lane 120Kmh with a minimum of 100Kmh.
Of course this means that people tend to stay in the fast lane. On quiet stretches I constantly found myself wanting to move over to the slower lanes, as you would automatically do in the UK or France, once you’d overtaken, but I guess then I would have had to reduce my speed to the limit of that lane.
Due to this there is a lot of undertaking. There was some flooding on a parallel road at one point and the motorbikes thought nothing of leaving their road and driving up the hard shoulder against the traffic on the motorway, which didn’t have flooding, to avoid it. Another time there was a 4×4 in front of me, open at the back, think Toyota pick up. There were about eight people sitting in the back happily chatting away as the wind blasted their hair in all directions, while cruising along the middle lane at 100Kmh!
The drive passed off without a hitch and I am now some 350km south of Bangkok in a town called Prachuap Khiri Khan. I have 200km to do in the morning, before reaching the Catamaran Terminal outside of Chumphon.
There is a very lively food market here, with dozens of different stalls selling all sorts of Thai food. In the end I went for Tom Kha Goong, a spicy seafood soup. It was really spicy too! The tummy will be gurgling tonight. We found a great little hotel with a nice balcony, air con, a large room, wi-fi etc etc, for the princely sum of £16 for the night. By the way I did top of with some fuel on the way. Diesel is 35 baht a litre, about 80 pence.
There was a storm last night and the washing has not dried. I have a bag full of wet clothes, it’s not my fault, a certain person decided to do the laundry at 9pm.
Two beautifully wrapped sandwiches were sitting on a plate on our balcony this morning, a gift from the lady who owns the hotel, for our car journey. Very tasty they were too!
200Km to go to the Lomprayah Catamaran Pier, the road is clear and we make good time. There was a police road block, but they just asked me where I was heading and that was it, no documents required. I’m trying to connect my phone to the car bluetooth, but the radio, quite understandably, is all in Thai. I use an app that translates directly from the camera on the phone and soon get it working. What an amazing little app.
We stop at the equivalent of a motorway service station and have some really good food for about £1.50. There is a market as well, so we bought some pork with crackling, straight off of the BBQ, to eat on the way.
There are coconuts everywhere here, huge palm trees dominate the skyline and mounds of coconuts are piled up at regular intervals. The temperature is nice 32 degrees and we arrive in good time, having stopped at a laundry by the side of the road. They spun dried the clothes, which frankly didn’t make a lot of difference. They’ll be back out on a balcony later somewhere on Tao.
The Catamaran terminal is much bigger than I remember it. With a few shops and two catamarans moored up along with the speedboat, gulp! This is no longer a small operation, as it used to be.
Wonder of wonders we are boarding and were walked right past the speedboat onto a Catamaran, hurrah! We speed across a sea that could be made of glass it’s so smooth and then before we know it we have arrived. As always the first sight of Koh Tao is beautiful and evokes a storm of memories.
It’s mayhem on land and even busier than I remember, but I still managed to avoid the touts and taxi mafia, heading straight for a motorbike rental and deal done, off to our chosen hotel, a 70m2 apartment in the hills above Sairee, with a view out to sea. Perfect 🙂 Tomorrow is another day.
