Today our main mission was to post the remaining gifts from China that the Chinese wouldn’t let us send and to also post the gifts we had bought so far in Thailand. The posting process was easy. Buy a box that you fill up and then a guy tapes it and tells you how much it costs and how long it will take. You then pay at a separate counter with a very enthusiastic lady with a stamp that says SURFACE (I’m sure it won’t go by air by accident the lady was very thorough with the stamping), we posted 15kg of stuff! We liked lots of things so what else could we do. The sending now complete, we set off for a market, but this time only to get some shorts for Nicole. The market on the Sukumvet road was one long strip both sides of the pavement and sprinkled liberally with stall holders, who never seemed to stay at one stall. After a while we noticed something different (most the stalls have the same wares) and after some inspection and explanation we found some odd shaped pots that looked Chinese but were actually opium pipes from Cambodia. The man was desperate to sell them but despite how beautiful they were, and the amount of work taken to make them, they were not for buying but only looking. The other odd thing we found was that an unusual amount of the stall holders were deaf. Nicole caused quite a commotion when they found she could speak BSL too (the other countries so far use ASL). As I bargained for gifts Nicole struck up a conversation with a guy from Australia. He told here if we went to the end of the skytrain line at “Mo Chit” there was a huge market there and with lots of different stalls. Purchases in hand I rejoined Nicole and we hopped on the Skytrain again, headed to the end of the line. The market was huge and the man had warned Nicole not to get lost. It was a collection of small shops arranged in rows, seems simple to navigate, but all you need to do is get pushed off course or follow something you want and its all too easy to get disorientated and I think there is enough stalls you would only find your way back after a few days. There was no allowance for getting lost as we had only an hour before we needed to head back to the train to get back for our connection to Phuket. The market was entertaining, bright and filled with Beautiful gifts crafts and people, unfortunately also small people. Nicole had the same problems here and we decided that the shorts would have to wait till Phuket, where I hoped, like Goa, prices would have dropped due to the economic crisis.
We checked out of the Malaysia Hotel and got on a mini bus to take us to the bus. It took us to three other resorts to pick up people then unceremoniously dumped us out with all our bags and no bus in sight. No buses because it wasn’t the bus station (in fact so far I haven’t seen a bus station in Thailand, maybe there aren’t any) the bus went from the corner of a car park ten minutes walk away. Don’t even ask why our transfer didn’t take us there as I haven’t a clue. A lady in a shack asked for the passports and the ticket (a piece of paper with a stamp proudly saying “Phuket” on it) then asked us to fill out a form. She then took the “ticket” and gave me two sticky labels with “Pecett” written on them. I looked bemused and asked “Phuket”, yes she said and motioned that I should stick it to my shirt (It may as well have said “please look after this Bear”), I felt a bit like a piece of luggage and could only hope I would arrive at the correct destination. Waiting for the bus to arrive I started chatting to a guy who was going to Malaysia, to find out if there really was a train we could get from Hat Yai like the internet said (but the hotel told us it was not possible). He was going for a visa run and was going by bus and couldn’t help me. After boarding the bus we chatted for a few hours about travelling, his Thai girlfriend, how he came to live in Bangkok and even lizards. It turns out he was a breeder in Texas of Chinese water dragons and other reptiles.
The seats on the bus reclined and it wasn’t full so wrapped in a towel (that’s what we got instead of a blanket) and spread across two seats we tried to sleep as we started the 26 hour marathon journey.