The curfew caused huge problems for us when we tried to find transport back to Bangkok. Initially, we had planned to take a morning boat out of Ko Tao and get to Bangkok around 8:30PM, giving Josie just enough time to get to the airport. Actually, the last airport shuttle was 7:00, so maybe she wouldn't have made it anyway.
Either way, becasue fo the riots, all the morning boats were cancelled, so had to take an overnight sleeper boat, 12 hours after getting to the island! We finished our dive, filled in our divelog, ate dinner, then took a taxi and got to the pier at 9PM. We boarded the boat and went upstairs to the upper deck and to our surprise, there were mats laid out for all the passengers. Because it looked so comfortable, my trust went down, so I used my pack as a pillow (but my neck hated that in the middle of the night).
We met two brothers from Finland. I forgot their names, but it was something like Orle and Larlen, or Orale and Vato, or Orville and Wright. I don't even know how to make fun of a Finnish name. Larlen was doing a six-month study aborad in Malaysia and his brother came to pick him up. The funniest thing was the 10 shades of difference in their tans. Larlen said Finalnd was -15 degrees centigrade (5F) when he left and Malaysia was 35 (95F) when he got there a day later.
We left the pier around 10 in the middle of a huge thunder storm. The boat was rocking like crazy and I had images of the Titanic going down ... only in tropical warm waters, and a boat about a tenth its size. It took about 6 hours to get to Chumpon, but since we hadn't slept very well the past two nights, I slept like a baby the whole way.
The bathroom at the pier was probably the worst one I used since I left Japan (although the porto-potty in Taiwan with the step-by-step instructions with pictures of someone's shit was pretty bad). This squatter came equipped with a bee hive and a colony of mosquitos.
Next, we got in a minivan and they took us to a restaurant to wait for the actual bus that was going to take us back to Bangkok. Thailand is very smart with their waiting areas and bus companies. I mean, I'd prefer waiting at a restaurant over a bus station with nothing to do, but I want it to be my choice, not the bus company's.
The bus came to the restaurant right on schedule, at 7:00AM. Very very reluctantly I decided to put my bag in the luggage storage on the outside, kinda also becasue the driver was yelling at me to. All I have to do is get to Bangkok and I won't have to take anymore long-haul buses, just the 45-minute one to the airport.
The bus started off going really slow and I read stories on the internet that this is usually the point where some guy is in the luggage compartment going through all our stuff. I kept nervously looking outside, but I think the driver was just trying to fill up the bus before heading off. It's crazy, some people stood up the entire 8 hours back to Bangkok. It's hard to give up your seat on a bus that long ... no matter who's standing.
We got in around 3:30PM and my bag was slightly unlatched, but that's happened twice already. I don't know if it just happens by accident, or if someone's trying to get in it. I have locks, zipties, and bungee chords all over my pack, and I tie all the strings together so to actually open it up, you'd have to do a lot of work ... or just simply cut it open.
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