23/10/07 - 25/10/07 Farang Bar 250B

The bus dropped us at 7am around 8km out of town in the pouring rain on I guess the equivalent of the A63. We sat under a bus sheleter for a while as I wasn't even fully awake, while we tried to formulate a plan... oh yeah and work out which way the town was! A lady from a nearby cafe pointed us in the right direction and as the rain wasn't stopping we donned our ponchos and headed out to where we hoped we could catch a sawngthaew.

Tried to flag a ride into the town, but had no hope as they were all full, some guy offered to take us in one by one on his moto... but aswell as the fact he wanted to charge some extortionate price I really didn't fancy getting on the back of a moto with all my luggage... in the rain.

After seeing our struggle to flag anything down some guy who spoke very little english tried to offer to take us into the town on the back of his pickup... now normally I'd be very wary of any offers like that... especially as we had no idea where we were heading... but it was raining and there were three of us (safety in numbers and all that!) so while the girls were discussing our safety i jumped in the back and they followed suit.

Got into town fine and asked in a shop the way to the guesthouses listed in Hazel's Lonely Planet (grrr!) which were not too far away. Farang (the name of the bar) actually means foreigner. Due to the rain it seemed unlikely that the ferries would be heading to Ko Tao that evening so we decided to wait a day and check out Chumphon... if you are ever faced with the smae dilema... don't bother.

We woke up the next morning in 6" of water, with our stuff and some dead cockroaches floating round the room. All our backpacks were soaked along with the contents and I picked up my full emersed handbag effort and watched the water drain. I also had to empty my camera of water... nice. Luckily it has since recovered... but Hazel was not so lucky and her camera and phone were ruined. The staff didn't really seem to care and although they (eventually) gave us a couple of rooms to move our stuff into... there first suggestion was to offer us 50B off the following night... I don't think so!

In the end they gave us free rooms for the following night and laundered our clothes and stuff that had been soaked through with the dirty water.

I overheard some guy saying that Ko Tao was just as flooded and the power was down... so we decided not to wait around and to get out of there. Chumphon itself was really dull and like a ghost town with nothing whatsoever to do. There was a very dull food market and some very dull shops and that's pretty much it. The only thing we liked about it was the Chinese Minimart down the road from our sh!tty guesthouse which sold the most amazing homemade banana bread and had the craziest loveliest lady running it who got super-excited everytime we went in. (also her mother thought I had lovely skin... the old ladies just can't get enough of my tan resistent skin, hehe!).

On the second night I thought I might chew my own arm off with boredom, so we booked a ticket to Krabi for the next morning.

My final memory of the good times (ahem) in humphon was that when I got my laundry back all of the colours had run and one of my dresses I have never even worn is ruined... definitely NOT good times!