Sunday, November 21, 2004 (Khao Lak - Thailand)
Another hard day in paradise doing nothing at
all. Still looking for that illusive cheap flight to Cambodia. Sorting out how
to repair my defective CD/DVD drive on the laptop. Wrecking the wreck dive idea.
Not all travel agencies are born equal. Resting up before tackling the world's
largest schnitzel.
Day 258 (68). As was also the case yesterday,
we spent most of the day today doing nearly nothing – and what a good
feeling it is to do so. It was a slow start with a lot less coughing than
yesterday. I’ve been nursing a soar throat for the past few days and have
managed so far to keep it relatively in check with lozenges but late in the
evening and early in the morning is when it’s most bothersome and I can
sometimes have real difficulty swallowing. This morning was particularly
irritating, as I couldn’t get rid of the tickly
cough.
Breakfast downstairs was the
same as yesterday. There aren’t that many people here in the resort as far
as we can tell and we were again the only customers for this morning’s
buffet spread, although this did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of the staff
in greeting and serving us.
Shortly
after I polished off my toast and specially prepared fried eggs, I went off to
find an Internet café to see whether the Bangkok Air web site was
functioning again. Alas, it still had that annoying message about the online
booking engine being down for maintenance. Bangkok Air is the only operator that
I’ve found that flies the Bangkok to Siem Reep route for a decent price.
At just 2,600B (€50) per person for a one-way flight, it seems almost too
good to be true and I certainly hope that I can relocate those fares when the
web site starts working again, assuming it ever will. We now have about a week
before our initial thirty-day tourist visa for Thailand expires so we need to
leave the country before then and I’m now banking on this flight to Siem
Reep for this.
Whilst at the Internet
Café, I noticed an e-mail from the Apple repair centre in Melbourne.
I’ve been communicating with them about trying to arrange a warranty
repair for my defective CD/DVD drive on the laptop. We still haven’t been
able to watch any of those new release DVDs that we bought on the cheap in
China. I’ll be so very annoyed if they are confiscated from us upon
arrival in Australia before I’ve had a chance to watch any of them.
Anyway, I had previously sent the repair centre the serial number of my little
aluminium baby in the hope that this would be sufficient to validate the
warranty but, alas, their e-mail indicated that they still needed some form of
proof of purchase to boot (no pun intended). I did think of this potential
scenario at the outset of this trip and printed off credit card receipts
documenting the purchase for just this eventuality, so I e-mailed Lisa back in
England to see if she could find them in the special stash we left behind. The
repair will be quite a chunk of change if we can’t get the warranty
validated.
I went back to collect
Sandy and we both walked the couple of hundred meters up to the one main road
that is Khao Lak. We popped into the Sea Dragon offices again to see about our
wreck dives for tomorrow but none of the regulars we’ve been dealing with
to date were there this morning. Instead, there was an austere Australia girl
that I took an immediate dislike to. I kept asking her questions about the dive,
such as visibility, whether we could arrange our own dive master, currents and
so on, but she kept either evading the questions or giving me non-committal
answers. In the end, I got so fed up with this that I decided on the spot that
we would not do the wreck dives after all. Instead, we would travel back to
Bangkok tomorrow, so we moved on and shopped around a bit for travel tickets to
that end. We may be coming back this way to do the Surin Islands live-aboard so
we might re-consider the whole wreck dive thing again then. Hopefully, a more
competent rep will help us with our questions
then.
Making phone calls here in
Thailand, even local national ones, is very expensive and cumbersome compared to
every other country we’ve been to so far. If ever there was a country
where our own cell phone would come in handy, this was it, as there have been
several times now that we’ve needed to make a call but have been unable to
do so easily or conveniently. As we looked for travel agents, we also tried to
find somewhere that sold a tri-band mobile phone. It has to be a tri-band phone
if it’s to also work in the other countries on our destinations list. The
one place that we were directed to didn’t seem to exist any more so
we’ll have to shop around in Bangkok
instead.
Everybody and his brother
here in Khao Lak has a travel agency outlet set up either inside or just in
front of their premises. Not all travel agencies here are born equal, however,
and if nothing else, our shopping around showed that there was some degree of
difference between them all for prices to the same destination. Khao Lak is on
the West coast but the closest and most conveniently located train station from
here is near Surat Thani over on the East coast, a two to five hour bus ride
depending on the type of bus. The air-conditioned, overnight sleeper carriage
from there to Bangkok should cost something in the region of 550B
(€10,58). One gentleman quoted me nearly 900B (€17,30) for this
ticket. I queried this but he claimed that he had to book train tickets via
special agency and it was this other agency that was charging the high
commission. I thanked him politely and we were on our
way.
After passing through a couple
of different travel agencies, I was starting to get a good feel for the costs
involved in getting us back to Bangkok. The Surat Thani train station is
actually in a closely neighbouring town called Phun Phin and according to the
train timetables, trains arrive and depart to Bangkok from there every half an
hour or so throughout the evening so it seemed that the most cost effective
option for us would be to just worry about getting to Phun Phin and buying the
tickets ourselves directly at the train station – without having to pay
anybody any commission at all. It turns out that there are several options for
getting to Surat Thani by bus. Ranging from 90B (€1,73) all the way up to
300B (€5,77), you can take anything from the public bus all the way up to
a small, air-conditioned minivan. The public bus took five hours but the minivan
would traverse the slither of Southern Thailand in just two and a half hours
without having to stop every fifteen minutes to pick up or drop off passengers.
For this trip, time on the road was more of an issue than cost, so we elected to
go with the minivan option. We booked this ticket with a rather nice, young,
plump woman we felt comfortable with at one of the agencies down the main
road.
With the immediate need of how
to get out of Khao Lak now taken care of, we went back to the hotel for some
more of the very serious business of lounging around the pool. Yes, I know,
it’s a very hard life but, well, somebody has to live it, don’t
they? We supplemented our time out in the heat with some more time lazing in our
room. All of this hard work had to give way eventually, and after several ours
of this backbreaking resting, we dried off and went into town to find something
to eat. In fact, I already knew exactly where to go and we returned again to
that one restaurant that is owned and operated, indeed also mostly frequented,
by Germans. If Koh Lanta was teeming with Swedish, the Khao Lak is the hangout
of choice for Germans. There was really only one choice on the menu for me
– a whopping great lump of schnitzel that is a fare bit larger than most
large dinner plates. Even after slicing a third of it away for Sandy to enjoy, I
still barely managed to get through it al – but did! With a belly that
full of schnitzel, there is little else a man can do but climb into bed and doze
off – so I did.
Posted: Sun - November 21, 2004 at 07:20 PM