A surprisingly nice sleep
I woke up at about 4:30am, just as the ship was docking in Suratthani, on the mainland. After slowly coming to my senses, I gathered all of my stuff together and disembarked the ship once it had docked. It’s also unnoteworthy that the state of the bathrooms got progressively worse over the night…plenty of people were seasick it seems. Once everyone had left the boat, we waited in a small area, a short walk away from the ship. Someone told us that tuk tuks would arrive shortly to pick us up and take us to the bus station. From there, a bus will take us to Phuket.
Our tuk tuk group consisted of several fairly raucous tourists who were loud and proud. We had short wait at the bus station (which looked like a bare bones café) and checked in with the bus ticket folks. Not long after, the bus to Phuket arrived, and we all made a mad rush for the bus. There weren’t many of us compared to the number of seats, so no biggy. As the journey progressed, more and more people got on, but I didn’t take much notice as I was constantly drifting in and out of sleep.
Arriving in Phuket
The bus to Phuket was rather uneventful, aside from a couple of police officers boarding and searching a few folks, Mat included. The journey as a whole took 6-7 hours, it’s quite a long stint, but you get used to it; the key is to sleep. Once the bus had arrived in Phuket, we got off and began looking at taxis to our hostel. I didn’t take into account that Phuket’s status as a very popular holiday destination probably lead to the inflated taxi prices. We were going to use Grab, but as the prices were quite high here too, we decided to be swayed by a dude trying to sell the local taxis to us.
The distance to our hostel was around 5km from the bus terminal, and took about 20 minutes. We arrived at our hostel after a small struggle to find it as it’s quite small. Our hostel was called Home&Hug. The hostess was very welcoming and friendly, and the place has a cosy feeling to it. It’s not luxury by any stretch, but it’s nice, and cheap too. We went to our room, which was pretty modest, and chilled here for a while. A long bus journey takes it out of you, I tell you! After having recuperated our energy, we headed out for some food.
Checking the town
We’d only been walking for 5 minutes before we found a nice café that we wanted to eat at. It was very chill, and full of character, run by a Chinese fellow. After our meal, we explored the local markets and shopping centre. They were mostly derelict and not somewhere you’d want to be after dark. Just around the corner, we found a larger shopping centre, which was more what I was thinking of. It took us quite a while to walk round and see everything. On a positive note, we’re having cereal tomorrow for breakfast, yippee! We also had ice cream from Dairy Queen, it’s not the cheapest but it is sooo delicious.
After our hunger was sated by the ice cream, we made our way back to the hostel. Through Anya, the hostess, we were able to book transfer tickets to the Phi Phi Islands, which is where we’re headed in a couple of days. While the iron was hot, we also booked tickets from the Phi Phi Islands to Ao Nang, which is on the mainland. We also asked her about activities we could do tomorrow; she gave us a map and drew a route on it with which we could take some bikes and explore. Sounds like a plan!
Having been productive, we headed back to the room. Whilst resting, we looked further into the Japan Rail Passes, for when we go to Japan in April. After it was dark, we headed out for the final meal of the day; it was quite tough as most places had shut. After a lengthier walk than anticipated, we found a place on a corner. We chowed down on our food, and turned in for the night.
