Our time has finally come. First stop Thailand. The pre-journey six weeks were really busy, we almost managed to arrange everything. Sold most of our stuff, including furniture, etc, and got the visas, tried to let the house, hopefully nothing dangerous got missed.
Some photos of the last days at home:
We rented a car to get to Heathrow on Thursday, the roads were nice and clear, got there in 4 hours. With plenty of time left (my newborn inner control freak kicked in, so left over 10 hours before scheduled flight), we hung around a bit and finally got on the plane. It was so huge! Daniel briefed me the day before about technical data, so I knew all about it. The flight was really pleasant, I would recommend Quantas to anybody. Good food, watching movies (Source code), some sleep and landing in Bangkok the next day. It was 31 C degrees!
No Gizmo allowed as the Gremlins will destroy the plane if it gets wet!
As we are really travelling on a budget we took the cheap transport from the airport, I had all the details off the net. There were no other tourists on the buses at all! Everybody was looking at us like in a zoo but they were really helpful. They really love kids and people were touching Aaron which we were a bit worried about to start with but they were genuinely kind. Daniel was paranoid as usual and was convinced that they want to kidnap us.
We missed the last bus from the Southern Bus terminal to Koh Samui in the evening and wanted to spend the night there but were kindly kicked out by the guards. They found a guy who was happy to arrange a room for the night for us though. The man guided our taxi on a motorcycle into a shady alley with no road surface. Even they Bangkok taxi driver was laughing nervously about it. We shat ourselves but the house turned out to be rather nice after all and really cheap indeed. For 400 baht (£8) we got a room with shower and was clean and acceptable. It wasn’t far from the terminal either so the next morning we walked back there. On the way we had our first interaction with the local street dogs. They are lovely, calm, well fed and love kids.
Aaron's note when seeing the old and scruffy ferry: 'Let's face it: garbage' (Remy from Ratatouille)
The bus journey to the ferry was 10 hours and the driver almost left us at a resting area! I am sure if Kati doesn’t stand in the door he would have just closed up and left. I think people here, especially the ones wearing uniforms (busdrivers, policemen, etc) generally look down on foreigners.
The ferry trip was uneventful and after a half an hour taxi run we got to the guest house. It is bootiful!
The weather is perfect, no rain so far and more importantly and surprisingly: no mosquitoes! :) More to come shortly.
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