"5 HOURS WAITING...

... 4 SILLY FORMS, 3 TAXI CABS, 2 PASSPORTS AND A NIGHT BUS TO KOH TAO"

DAY 64: Bangkok to Koh Tao

In an ideal world, today would have gone as follows: get emergency travel documents (today!) with no hassle whatsoever, and hopefully for free, then head down to the island of Koh Tao tonight for the next week or so. That was the plan anyway.

We jumped in a cab to the British embassy at 8.30am which took just over an hour in the morning traffic. We hardly had to queue to get through security and were seen almost immediately at the consular. Good times. Forms already filled in back at the hotel, we were well prepared until they hit us with a £200 fee. Bad times. Wouldn't have minded too much but we have to pay nearly the same when we get back to get new passports. On the plus side they would be ready by 1pm today and we could leave our backpacks there.

So we spent our waiting time in a nearby department store which was just like home, with an M&S and a Topshop/Topman. Thankfully there was no temptation to spend as it's much more expensive than the UK. After a Starbuck's we spent an hour or so window shopping before heading to a tourist information office to see if we could book a trip to Koh Tao tonight.

The tourist information office didn't speak any English nor could they give us any information. Pretty useless for a tourist information place then. So we decided to grab an early lunch before heading back to the embassy... in a tuk tuk. These things are great. They're all chavved up, complete with chrome trim and go like the clappers. Although I'm not sure they'd pass an MoT in the UK. Also not sure about their drivers. A bit kamikaze.

After bombing around a few streets we arrived at the embassy to a bit of a queue. Although we were in soon enough, and were seen within five minutes, we were told we'd had to wait for authorisation as the person was in a meeting. Nearly two hours passed and we were told we'd have to go to the immigration office on the other side of town to get our entry/exit visa sorted. And they shut at 4.30, so we had to get our skates on.

Another cab and we arrived at the immigration office with our five bags and two suit carriers. God knows how they let us in, but they did. We went to the counter and no one was waiting. Bonus. But then we were sent to another counter, which was ok as there was no queue there either. Then we were sent into a room with about a hundred people who were all waiting for different things; visa extensions, passports, alien applications (god knows what these were). In the end we only had to wait about half an hour then we were sorted. It was now a race against time to see if we could get on the 6pm night bus to Koh Tao.

We jumped in our third cab of the day at about 4.30pm and raced to Khao San Road as this seemed to be our best chance of booking the bus/boat tickets, although we had a very kind offer of staying at Lyndsay's (Billy's sister) house if we needed to which was very nice of her.

We finally arrived at Khao San Road at about 5.40pm after battling the traffic and road closures (the King's fault). We were too late for our bus! But there was an 8pm bus that was a bit more luxurious and only 200 baht (£4) more expensive. Two tickets please.

We then decided to have some dinner before heading back to the booking office by 7.30pm as instructed. At 8pm we were escorted to the bus office to check in and told the bus would be leaving at 9pm. Having wasted an hour and a half waiting, we finally departed Bangkok at 9.15pm and they played Prince of Persia on the TV, which was a nice surprise. A good film, I think, as about two minutes from the end the audio became dubbed Thai language so I can only guess the ending. Classic.

The seats on this bus weren't bunk beds like our Vietnamese night bus, there were giant reclining leather beasts of a chair and the journey was much smoother. Also there was no smoking or tooting of the horn to keep me awake, which was very welcome.

We stopped at about midnight for a break at some services. All the signs were in Thai, so I can only assume the sign in the picture meant men's urinals. A lucky guess. Back on board we both managed to get a few broken hours sleep.