Heading south
We woke up at 8am today as we were getting a mini bus to Hat Yai at around 10am. The pair of us had a quick breakfast, and packed all of our stuff away. We waited around in the reception area for the dude to come and pick us up, but he was a tad late. Suddenly, nature called, and I had to go to the toilet. Sod’s law that the driver came whilst I was in there. I hurried up and hopped onto the bus to Hat Yai.
We were the first ones to be picked up, and over the course of an hour, we filled the bus by collecting more folks going to Hat Yai. After picking everyone up, the bus drive down to Hat Yai took around 4-5 hours. As per usual, I had several naps to make the time pass quickly, works a treat! In Hat Yai, a woman with her kids got off, leaving just Mat and I on the bus. We thought this was the stop for getting off, so we did. It turned out that it wasn’t the drop-off point. However, it also turned out that we were mere minutes from our hostel by foot. Happy accidents.
Snug hostel
The hostel was called Silla House, and it was quite central in the city. What was more convenient for us, is that it was only a short walk to the train station. Tomorrow, we’d be catching the train which takes us over the border to Pedang Basar in Malaysia. What was better, is that the rooms and decoration were really snug and full of character. I’m not one for admiring decorations and such, but I really liked this place; very homely. Our room was quite small, and had one bunk in it.
After chilling in the hostel for a while, we went out and explored the surrounding area. There was nothing spectacular in our area that we saw, just a typical city. We did discover a couple of shopping centres, but these weren’t too good, and one was closed. On Google Maps, we also discovered a night market of sorts, although this was very dodgy. There were a lot of stores selling X-rated goods, such as pornography, ‘toys’, and even guns, though I’m not sure if they were real or not.
Sugar galore
At one of the shopping centres we nipped to later on, we had a meal at a hotpot themed restaurant. Similar to our first hotpot, we were the laughing stock of the staff it seems. Our inability to understand the menu, or order food put a few smiles on their faces. I’m always happy to serve! After this meal, we exited the shopping centre, and as luck would have it, there was a doughnut shop right next door. Needless to say, we were straight in there for some pudding. Doughnut by nature, doughnut by name; Mister Donut was a god send.
It turns out that we could get 12 doughnuts, for the price of 6. We’d struck gold in Thailand! This was fantastic news; we were overjoyed at this revelation. These are no ordinary doughnuts; these are the bee’s knees. We returned to our hostel, triumphant, smiles on our faces. It’s safe to say, those doughnuts didn’t last long…they didn’t last long at all. After narrowly avoiding diabetes, we chilled for the rest of the night, unable to move.
