Today was a travel day, and about as frustrating as travel days come. The previous day, before crossing to Penang, I had bought a bus ticket from Butterworth to Hat Yai, Thailand, for 9am, but when I got to the bus station the company who sold me the bus ticket told me the bus wasn’t coming, and that I would have to take a minibus instead. I used to think the minibus was good—back in India, it was the only vehicle that didn’t possess a horn loud enough to wake the dead—but now I’ve learned that minibus means less leg room, worse shocks, less temperature, and, overall, less comfort.
But I didn’t have any other option, so I climbed aboard the minibus along with six Malaysians and a pair of German backpackers who looked as if they had no clue what they were doing.
The minibus driver turned out to be a total idiot. He left one woman in the van on the side of the road—she was supposed to be meeting a car, but it wasn’t there, so he just left her standing there on the shoulder. Two minutes later we passed the car, and he just shrugged his shoulders. Later, we stopped for gas, and it took the guy twenty minutes, two trips inside, and numerous conversations with gas station attendants to fill the tank. I still don’t know what was going on there.
Then we got to the Thai border, and the guy asked for our passports and RM 3 each. I asked what the money was for, and he said it was for Thai immigration forms. I told him those didn’t cost money, but he wouldn’t stop asking for the three ringgit, so finally we all paid him and he left with our passports. Half an hour later he returned with our passports and Thai immigration forms filled out with a typewriter—we had paid RM 3 to wait half an hour for someone to type our names on a piece of paper when we could have filled it our ourselves in five minutes for free.
The only upshot of the driver’s stupidity was that it got me talking to the two German guys. It turned out that they were headed to the same place I was—Ko Tarutao National Marine Park—which was fantastic, because the only accommodations on in the park were longhouses that you had to rent by the room (each room contained four beds).
Our driver’s final stroke of genius was dropping us off at the main bus station in Hat Yai. “Where you go next?” he asked us. “Pak Bara,” we told him. “OK, you get bus to Pak Bara here.” We walked to ticket window and found out that there was no bus to Pak Bara—we’d have to take a sawngthaew (pickup truck with two benches in the back) to the minibus station 3km away. Thanks a lot, driver.
We finally caught a minibus from Hat Yai to Pak Bara, where we hoped to catch a ferry to one of the islands in the national park, but when we arrived we found out that the last ferry had left at 1:30pm. Worse, the first ferry the next morning didn’t leave until 11:30am. Wouldn’t it make more sense to space the departures out a bit?
There was absolutely nothing to do in Pak Bara except eat, and that I did with a passion. After I had stuffed myself to the brim with red curry, white rice, and mango and honey pancakes, I headed back to our rat-infested guest house (it was just for a night, we reasoned) and went to bed.
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