Day 93 - George Town/Surat Thani

The alarm wakes us up and we head down stairs for our last breakfast in Malaysia and sample some more of that lovely banana bread mmmmm. I have been savaged by mosquitos on my left leg and only have 2 bites on my right leg ... clearly it doesnt taste as good as the left! The room we have been staying in has open slats above the window with no netting over it so we figure they must have just come in while we were asleep and from listening to the other people at breakfast a few other people have been savaged as well so at least I'm not the only one.

Anyway we throw the last bits in our bags, grab some snacks from the local shop for the monster train journey and hop in a taxi to the ferry port. The ferry back to the mainland is free and takes about 15 minutes dropping us off just outside of Butterworth train station where we'll be getting the train to Thailand. As we were on the ferry it started pouring down but luckily we were under cover and the walkway to the train station was completely covered so we didnt get drenched! After seeing on the way here that there wasn't actually a coach station we were unsure of what to expect for the train station (wondering if there will actually be a building or not) thankfully there was a nice big aircon room for us to wait in.

The train arrived about 40 mins later than scheduled and we hopped aboard to find the seats that we would be spending the rest of the day on. There was lots of nice green scenery along the way, there were cows just tied up at the side of the tracks and the train had to slow down a few times and sound its horn to move animals such as goats off of the track.

After about 5-6 hours we finally reached Padang Basar where we had to get off the train, go through the Malaysian immigration to leave the country, walk around the corner and go through the Thai immigration to enter Thailand. Took about half an hour to get through both lots of immigration and by this point we were both starving having only had a little breakfast back at the hostel and rationing crisps and oreos between us for the rest of the day. There was a guy selling food and drink outside of the immigration office so I bought what I thought was like a pastry with a blueberry filling and one with a vanilla filling ... when we got on the train they turned out to be hot dog buns sliced in half with a bit of flavoured spread in the middle. Thankfully as soon as we were seated back on the train the food carriage was connected and we soon had a 3 course thai meal on the way :) The lady that served us also gave us one of the local beers Singa and the bottle was almost as big as a bottle of wine! It was just what we needed, we wolfed the food down and settle in to some games on the iphone.

As the train was late picking us up and a few delays along the way we arrived in Surat Thani a little later than expected (about half 2 in the morning) but thankfully there were taxis waiting to take you where you need to go. They weren't official taxis just a bunch of locals wanting to make a bit of money we think but we got to the hotel safely and got ourselves checked in for about 3am. By this point we were both over tired so had to watch a bit of thai tv before we could drift off to sleep to prepare ourselves for travelling to Koh Samui tomorrow.