April 12th 2009

I thought our last trip was pretty bad, but it doesn't even compare to this one. We left Monday night to go find a train, but it's thai new year and everything is booked, so we had to get a bus for Tuesday. So we left on Tuesday at 7pm on a 14 hour bus ride (combination of 2 buses). They played an American movie that had subtitles in English, that had been translated to Thai and back to English. It was awful. We were on this first bus for about 10 hours, almost 10 minutes away from our stop, when a policemen pulls us over. There are 3 people working, 2 bus drivers and another guy. Both the bus drivers got arrested for who knows what. We had to wait on the side of the street for about 30 minutes and wait for another bus to come pick us up. We took this other bus to the bus stop. Here we had to take a 20 minute ride in the back of a truck to our other bus. There people were trying to sell us rooms, but we already knew where we wanted to go so they put us on another bus which turned out to be the local bus. It made stops every few minutes. We were miserable by this time. We ended up in our destination of Phuket town at almost 3 the next day. We spent almost 20 hours traveling on a bus! And i can't sleep sitting up on buses. We found a guest house in Phuket town for 500 baht a night, which is about $15, split three ways.....
Phuket is an island and Phuket town is in the center of this island. From there you can go to all the beaches, so we went to a different beaches everyday. It was mostly older Sweedish people. The beaches were really nice, but over crowded. The sand was clean and the water was clear. It was pretty expensive for food and things because of the foreign tourist. We spent three days here and it fairly uneventful. We just hung out on the beach and played frisbee or whatever. We had to book another bus back to Bangkok, but this time we found it for 1 bus, 12 hours and half the price. So we get in the bus and they start playing Thai music as loud as possible, and Thai music is probalby the worst music I've ever heard. They then played some movie dubbed in Thai, that in English was probably pretty bad. I had some woman in front of me leaning back into my lap and another person behind me laying down in his seat with his feet in the back of my seat, kicking me every 30 minutes. We did get there in a little under 12 hours, but it was still the worst traveling expierence of my life. I want to stick to trains and stay away from buses....
I want to add that Uncle Mark would be in style here. Almost everyone wears Chuck Taylor's and every shoe store has tons of them. But right now it is Thai new year, called Songkran. One of the top 10 festivals of the world. I'll tell you about it after it's over.