Amazingly We've Made It To Chiang Mai

It's sort of hard to believe, but we've made it here to Chiang Mai. You'd think it would have been a fairly easy and boring trip, but that's not quite the case.

We arranged the Night Boat from Koh Tao to get us back to Surit Thani (this is a port on the mainland of Thailand), from which we could then get a plane to Bangkok and from Bangkok to Chiang Mai.
We spent all of Tuesday hanging out around Koh Tao, wasting time, just as I wrote in my previous entry. We bludged in the Internet cafe for a couple of hours, then spent the afternoon in a nice cheap resturant where we just bought a drink every hour and lounged on the comfortable mats reading our books and planning our next few days. Eventually 8pm rolled on and it was time to and catch the Night Boat.

We arrived down at the pier and found the boat, easy enough even though there's never any labels or signs, you just have to figure it out. Sarah got on first and went to get us a good spot to sleep, I had to stand in the queue to give the lady our ticket. After ignoring me and every other westerner in favour of taking money from Thai people, she finally took my ticket and said "Upstairs full, down OK?" The boat was a two tiered boat, but I hadn't even realised that downstairs was also a sleeping area. Like Sarah I'd figured it was just the storage area, seeing as there were scooter and motorbikes as well as everyone's packs there. But no, peering through the various bits I could also see people there. Not good. Back to the lady, she kept saying over and over (about 15 times) "Upstairs Full! down OK?" to which I'd reply "Well I don't have a choice, do I? Downstairs is OK, thankyou." She'd then repeat her little "Upstairs Full!" routine again. I think in hindsight "down OK?" wasn't actually a question, more of a demand. I yelled out to Sarah that she had to leave the nice, clean, well lit upstairs area and join me in the doom, gloom and looks-almost-rat-infested area below deck. Here only 2 of the 6 fluro lights worked, there was no numbering system for the sleeping area, you just had to grab a spot and protect it. There where some wooden "windows" which where open and were only about a metre above sea level. You couldn't stand upright because you'd bash your head, you had to croutch down to walk around.
We took some photos which should give you some idea of what it was a like. The couple next to us said "We were told there were individual rooms!" which we all thought was most amusing.

Once it set off things seemed to get worse. The rocking and rolling of the sea combined with lying down and having no clear reference point made both Sarah and I feel quite woozy. Sarah eventually had a bit of a upchuck out the side window, then an anti-nausea pill, I started to feel OK after about an hour.
I then realised I needed a "big job" and the only toilet on the boat was a squat toilet. I will spare the details, but being thrown around while trying to squat and have a poop isn't something I'm in a hurry to repeat.

Somehow we actually managed to get some sleep, once the boat got out in the deep sea the rocking, rolling and bashing into waves seemed to settle down a lot and it was quite smooth. Once you tuned out the disel noise and smell of course! The boat pulled into Surit Thani about 4:30am and we all got off, walking the same narrow wooden plank we had to get on the damn boat.
Not quite what we were expecting, but an experience I'll never forget that's for sure.

We jumped in a cab and headed out to Surit Thani airport. Which of course was totally closed and locked up as our flight wasn't until 10:45am and we arrived about 5:30am. A security guard arrived abotu 6am and let us in, but the airport itself wasn't even fully functioning until about 9:30 when the lights and aircon came on. Sarah crashed out on the floor, I walked around looking at various things, read my book and played my PSP. As silly as it seems karting my PSP around, it's a godsend for the big 5-hour-sit-around-do-nothings like Surit Thani airport.
Once checkin finally opened we were told that the plane was delayed an hour and that we both had 1kg too much in our packs. We were however allowed to take it out of our packs and put it into our carry on day packs, I was worried we'd have to throw stuff out.

After even more delay finally the plane took off and headed to Bangkok. I was asleep before the plane had even taken off, waking up only when it thumped down to land.
We had another 7 hours of time to burn up in Bangkok airport before our 8pm flight to Chiang Mai, we just got some food, walked around the terminal, read magazines, I played PSP and Sarah watched movies on her iPod. Then we flew into Chaing Mai.

We jumped in a cab to our Guest House and poor cabbie seemed to get lost, not quite what you want after 36 odd hours of travelling. Finally though he found our guest house and we checked in. Woohoo! A room with AC, HOT water and the Holy Grail as far as I'm concerned, a fridge! Cold beer! We went and got a bite to eat at a resturan that was almost closed until we arrived, then went to bed and crashed out, hard.

We are just going to take today really easy, before we head up to the Elephant rescue park tomorrow.
The guest house is the nicest we've stayed in so far, there's a huge bird cage with lots of budgies in it, it has wireless Internet (I can surf on my PSP!) and even a free computer with Internet access which I'm using to type this.

So we survived the nightboat of doom (oh yes I forgot to mention, the boat didn't have any life jackets I could see) and a lot of waiting around. Looking back it was quite an experience! Also a lot of fun.

Tim