As soon as we'd arrived in Bangkok, we asked where we needed to go to book a bus to Chumpon, we were pointed to a counter and brought a ticket- I thought it was for 7 in the evening, but we were hurried on to the next bus so no chance to get snacks/ go to the toilet. I hope this one stops more often than the other one (it didn't stop at all although the plus side is that we got there with no break downs).

The DVD choices were very interesting- there were some karaoke videos where a boy in sunglasses was in front of the sea, looking all Peter Andre-esque and it kept flashing to shots of a girl cooking rice and cleaning. Another TV series DVD had numerous scenes involving shoving something up a boy's bum and a girl dated all of the boys. A girl was violently hitting one of the boys and a girl in another music video did the same- I'm not sure it was very appropriate for the 7 year or so old boy next to us.

I had seen us go past road signs, with decreasing number of kilometres to Chumpon, but because 25 had only just gone past and because we were in the bottom of the coach and the side door we got in wasn't open, I didn't think to ask if it was our stop- I wasn't even sure it was a stop since I only saw the driver come off. However when I asked at the next stop whether it was Chumpon, the driver said it was the last one and only 2 people got off. I saw his bit of paper that said 4 people to get off at Chumpon so I was a bit angry that he hadn't thought to tell us given we clearly don't know when to get off and it shows he's not very good at his job, letting people stay on for further than they paid for!

It was quite easy to get a bus back to Chumpon though as he dropped us at a bus station and other people were getting on it too, so we knew where to board. This time we got off at the Chumpon bus stop (which said 'Welcome to Chumpon') but the taxi to the pier was 300 so we started walking to the main road to try and get a tuk-tuk or something. The bus we'd just got off picked us up again to take us closer to somewhere this would be possible. We followed a man who was going to Chumpon town who hailed a cab for us but he said it'd be 300 too- the guide book said a shared taxi would be 50 each. So we got in the shared taxi with the man. It dropped him and the rest of the passengers off in Chumpon and took us to the pier for 300 anyway. We had a bit of a hunt around to search out the best deal for the ferry (feeling guilty about not haggling the Bangkok-Chumpon bus down given it said it would be about half what we paid in the LP) but went for the 300 one we asked first as the LP mentioned it as being better than the 200 one if seas were choppy, so it would be better for Alice's seasickness.

We wasted time before the ferry taking advantage of the shower facilities and Wi-Fi and talking to the US couple who are on the same ferry as us.

We had dinner in a seaside restaurant, I had wide noodle pork soup and Alice had egg and veg fried rice. We went to the shop and filled the rest of our bellies with various snacks- Alice brought paprika and cheese crisps, chikki type things and I brought some candy filled marshmallows, weird salty fruit things which I think were tamarinds and a green bun thing which was doughy and quite tasty. I also took advantage of the free coffee in the waiting area but didn't know how to work the hot water so had a cold one- nice!

We boarded the ferry at 11pm- we both had lower bunks and it looked just like a massive dorm with about 40 beds in.