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My last night in Ko Tao I ended up celebrating the Dutch holiday of Queen's Day until very late in the morning. In fact when I got home I realized I had to wake up in less than three hours, fortunately my watch has three seperate alarms, all of which I set. The next morning I woke up to sun streaming into the room, I rolled blinked a couple of times and reached for my watch with a growing sense of foreboding.

The Scenic Route, Again . . .

Peter Wyant
2007-02-05 21:38:33

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My last night in Ko Tao I ended up celebrating the Dutch holiday of Queen's Day until very late in the morning. In fact when I got home I realized I had to wake up in less than three hours, fortunately my watch has three seperate alarms, all of which I set. The next morning I woke up to sun streaming into the room, I rolled blinked a couple of times and reached for my watch with a growing sense of foreboding. There was a reason I was nervous, I had slept through my alarms and had 20 minutes to dress, pack, check out and make it to the ferry that was taking me to the island, Ko Samui, that I was to fly to Singapore from. I packed faster than I had ever to date and headed down to check out, upon reaching into my pocket I reached that didn't have enough Thai Baht and of course the hotel didn't take VISA or US dollars so at a dead sprint I went to a nearby ATM and withdrew funds. I paid for the room and caught a taxi (read: the back of a pickup truck) that got me to the ferry in time, which was conviently 30 minutes late.

I hopped on the ferry to Ko Samui and promptly fell asleep, I was fairly comfortable falling asleep because everybody else around me was going to the same island as me. At one point we stopped briefly and I looked up, but figured it couldn't be Ko Samui because there was no annoucement and nobody else was getting off. After a stretch I began to get nervous because we still hadn't made it to the island and my flight was leaving soon. With a growing sense of dread (a common theme of this particular journey), I asked an employee when we would arrive, he informed me that we would get to Surat Thani at 4:30 pm, Surat Thani is a city on mainland Thailand - I had slept through my stop.

After this realization I began to wonder what to do next. I did the only thing I could, began heading south (although the owner of the boat did offer me a ticket, on a bus owned by him mind you, to Bangkok. While I'm no cartographer, ...