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Day 24
I had an hour to kill before boarding, and another before takeoff, so I wandered along the concourse looking for somewhere to get a final Thai massage before leaving. I found somewhere, but the prices were six times what you’d pay in town, plus there was a queue. I found an internet area and had to buy prepaid credit in blocks of 100 baht, so I wasn’t exactly rushed. I spent an hour online, chatting to friends back home (where it was still early evening), checking my email and reading the news. Thinking about Palm and her upcoming trip to the states, I checked into the climate in Utah – wow, cold.
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Day 23
I woke at about 5:30, and showered before i realised what the time was. I went back to bed again until a wake up call rang my phone at 8:30. I phoned Palm, to remaind her to bring her uni report on the River of the Kings show, which I was really interested to see. Fortunately by the time they showed up in the lobby Palm had found a baby to play with, which always seemed to make her smile. Wee had brought along her boyfriend, Bernard, who was pretty hard to miss at 6ft 8in. I’d guess Wee was about 5ft, if that, so it made so quite a contrast.
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Day 22
Wee and Palm showed up a little late, and while I waited Charlotte appeared again. She spent last night on the sleeper train and had just arrived – a proper goodbye was now in order but we’d done it twice already so it didn’t seem necessary. We walked to the local pier to get an express boat to the skytrain stop. We were heading for the weekend market, and I wanted to use the skytrain to get there since I hadn’t used it yet. We got sidetracked temporarily by a couple of german students who needed a complex set of directions, so we took them to their pier to get them started.
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Day 21
I got up fairly early to pack, and got to the beach at 8:45am. The boat was due at 9. Sue and Steve turned up as well, mainly to see how the boat ferry was organised so they’ll have no problems tomorrow. I arrived in Trang and took a Tuk Tuk back to the Trang Hotel, where my backpack with the rest of my stuff was waiting. After surviving the last few days with no more than what I could fit in a laundry bag and my day pack, I realised that most of the stuff I was carting around in my backpack was unnecessary. I repacked the backpack, integrating the island bag, and went down the road to the internet cafe.
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Day 20
Oh yeah – that hurts. Sunburn was as bad as I expected. This was the last day of the tour, and after breakfast I set about the serious business of lying in my hammock reading my book, stopping only briefly at 11 to bid farewell to Lorna and Charlotte, who left today for the mainland, and ultimately for Lorna, Edinburgh via Bangkok and London. Later on in the afternoon I realised that I probably didn’t have enough money to pay for the extra night plus all my drinks charges, so I considered returning to the mainland for some cash. It would have taken ages though, and eventually I managed to borrow a thousand baht from Steve. I couldn’t bring myslf to ask, but fortunately he offered.
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Day 19
After breakfast we left the island for another, smaller one nearby. This turned out to be a picture-perfect, deserted, idylic tropical island, selected for its coral reef. Snorkling gear was produced, and we spent the morning gazing down at the coral formations and schools of fish. I was slightly disappointed by the reef, but it would be tough to beat the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. After a couple of hours a boatload of Thai tourists and a couple of property surveyors arrived and made our island a lot less deserted, although no less idyllic.
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Day 18
Day 18 was a completely free day on the Gecko itinerary, but I had some pressing needs to attend to, such as finding something to wear on my feet. I walked over to the local village on the other side of the island with Lorna, with rope and shoes on my list. I needed the rope because I had bought a hammock in Sangkhlaburi that, as I discovered later, only had one piece of rope with it. The island had three major settlements. The one we left behind was the tourist village, spread out and fairly sparse. A path led across the island, through a big rubber plantation, and into the first of two local villages. This one was small, about the same size as the tourist village I would guess, although it was much more compact. Bits of old rope were lying about all over the place, but none were long enough for my hammock. I picked up a small fragment which I hoped might help me make my intentions understood when we finally found a shop. There were none in the first settlement, and we quickly left it behind, continuing on the path.
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Day 17
Lorna called me at 7:30 so waking up in time turned out not to be such a problem after all. I finished packing quickly, putting everything I needed for our island stay into my day pack and one of the hotel’s laundry bags. My backpack would be left in Wizit’s office in Trang to be picked up on my way back to Bangkok. Our guide for the day picked us and all our island luggage up at nine and we drove to what was described in the Gecko itinerary as a sea gypsy village, but which, for our purposes, simply was the place where the boats were kept. With Sue and Steve sharing one canoe, and Lorna, Charlotte and I in the other, we set off for the mangrove swamps that lie near the coast. We were towed most of the way there, and then released to paddle through the mangroves. The boats were very unstable, so I didn’t take my camera.
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Day 16
Steve wasn’t feeling well this morning so he and Sue stayed behind as Lorna and myself set off with Charlotte, and our brilliantly named guide, Wizit. We drove to a small village, and started walking into the jungle with a couple of Wizit’s younger cousins leading the way. The 11 year old was a walking machine – and he didn’t appear to require any rest. I suppose everyone’s like that when they’re eleven, especially if they have a tropical jungle on their doorstep. I gradually got used to the pace and managed to admire the scenery as we we trekked through streams and clamboured over rocks. The noise was deafening as insects making a chainsaw type sound screeched around us.
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Day 15
I don’t know what time it was when everyone started stirring – I was certainly awake anyway. I asked Charlotte if she had managed to sleep. “Oh yeah”, she said, as if she’d never slept this well before in her entire life. The train eventually pulled into Trang station and we took a very overloaded tuktuk to the Trang Hotel. After lunch the next stop on the tour was the Thale Noi Bird Sanctuary, where we had several hours bird watching from a dragon boat that whizzed around lotus-covered lakes. About half an hour in, the birds were losing their appeal for me, though Steve and Sue were glued to their binoculars. I was more interested in the boat, which was able to skip over poles, ropes and nets at high speed thanks to it’s slender design and propeller that is several metres behind the boat itself.