Escaping Paradise

The weather got progressively worse while we were in Railay until, on the last day, we were basically hiding in our room while it poured down outside. Of course, to leave the peninsula we had to go outside and in the few minutes it took us to get down to the waterfront we were pretty wet. We had assumed that we would be able to get a boat pretty quick after arriving at the beach; boats had been coming and going all the day over the course of the week. Unfortunately, the weather was bad enough that the fellow at the boating office, gesturing towards the turbulent ocean, said that there might not be any more boats for the day (it was about 11am at this point). A couple of other people were standing around waiting for boats as well and they had all been told different times for boats arriving so we figured there was still hope. So we stood around pretty wet and a little cold and stared at the gray ocean, willing a boat to arrive through the waves.

And it worked. It was less than an hour before a boat arrived and we were able to throw our bags on and jump in. The only downside of this was of course that the reason the boats might not be running was that there were some fairly considerable waves outside our little bay. I am not too big a fan of being out in big waves on small boats so I found the experience a little stressful. While we were in a trough of a wave we couldn't see past the crest of the next to see land (or anything else for that matter). I wanted to get a video of this with our camera, but I was a little too nervous to let go of the boat. Our captain turned out to be pretty adept though, working at diagonals to our intended direction in order to ride the crests of waves and the ride was fairly smooth. This compared favorably to some of the other boats we saw that were being tossed all over the place as their drivers rammed straight on.

It wasn't too long a ride and soon we were, happily, back on land. The adventure of travelling in Asia began anew. Thinking we were too smart for the fairly expensive taxi racket that was organized at the boat dock, we started walking towards what appeared to be a main road. We were rewarded fairly quickly when a covered pickup came over and grabbed us and for a reasonable price we were on our way into town. It turns out though we were going in the wrong direction. After a few minutes we were confusedly transferred into a different truck and were heading back the way we had come, the correct way to Krabi. After arriving in Krabi we took the first reasonably priced room we could get and did our best to set up some of our clothes to dry. We then headed back out to eat and explore a bit before settling in for the night.

The view from the covered pickup as we made our way into Krabi. We thought it was just crazy how much water there was. It only got worse though.

Trying to dry off in our hotel room.

We were up early the next morning, I think around 5:30 or so, in order to catch the 8am bus from Krabi into Bangkok. It was still raining. We initially assumed that we would be able to flag down a pickup or taxi on one of the main roads, but maybe due to the rain, no one was around. We ended up popping into a hotel to ask them to call us a cab and the enterprising fellow woke up his son and made him take us to the bus station. About then things started going a little wrong for us. It turned out that all the basses were sold out going back to Bangkok, everyone was trying to escape the rain. Meg was able to figure out that we could get a bus to a more central hub town instead and get a bus north from there. "There are many many buses from this city to Bangkok" we were told. Fortunately a bus left for the town at 9:30 and we were back on our way. Unfortunately, as was pretty common, the bus had its air conditioning cranked all the way so the bus was freezing cold. Being soaking wet made this experience even worse and we ended up in the fetal position on our seats trying to avoid hypothermia on the three hour trip. To top it off, it seemed that there was some serious leakage problems on the bus so there was cold water pouring from the roof all over the seats and on to peoples heads.

That wasn't too pleasant but after a few hours the bus ticket collector came by to ask us where we wanted to go, as we were nearing the end of the trip. Meg told him we were hoping to go to the main bus station to go to Bangkok. The guy nodded and we were soon dropped off at a bus station. Hindsight being what it is we should have been a little alarmed at this point. For one thing there were no proper bus company stalls at the station, and for another there were only two buses available heading up to Bangkok and they weren't leaving until the evening. We decided instead to take a more expensive route and take a minivan up to Bangkok. We just wanted to get there and have a proper sleep. The minivan wouldn't be around for a few hours so we went for a walk to explore a bit and grab a lunch.

The view from the bus station where we spent several hours one day in the spring of 2011.

We came back after lunch to find that the roads were so flooded heading up north that the minibus couldn't make it through. The trains had also been cancelled as the tracks were flooded. We decided to take a big bus instead and as it wasn't scheduled to leave for a few hours went out walking again. This time on our return our bus vendor seemed quiet agitated as it turns out our bus had been cancelled. At this point, we hopped into a friend of his' pickup and he drove us to what ended up being the REAL bus station. There had been buses leaving hourly going north all day long and we had missed them all. It was possible that all of the rest of the buses were full now as well. Fortunately the vendor was pretty good to us in the end and was able to get us two seats to Bangkok. It was pretty frustrating realizing that we had wasted the whole day, but it was nice that the guy put the effort in to get us out of the city in the end. I think he still made a profit on us.

Relieved to be on the big bus and getting out of Dodge, we had a few minutes before it got completely dark to take in the craziness of the flooding. Water was up to peoples thighs on the side of the road, cars and motorbikes were pulled over and abandoned while boats powered along picking stranded people up. On the lighter side, we saw a few kids fishing the river/street from the sidewalk in front of their house.

After all of the chaos from the previous day the rest of the trip to London went really smoothly. The owners of the Bangkok hotel we had reserved a room for the night were understanding and didn't require that we pay for the night, and they shuttled us and our bikes to the airport. Our plane trip was on schedule and we were able to take the tube to within a block of our hostel downtown. Which was good news as we were dragging our boxed bikes everywhere at that point.