Day 21: We’re in Bangkok!
[ Sally typing ]
Upon entering our Bangkok hotel room, we throw down our things, look at each other and simultaneously exclaim, “we made it!”
You didn’t think we would, but we did. We made it back to Bangkok. This means that my portion of the bike touring is over. Once Tommy finishes his conference, he’ll resume touring up North in the Chiang Mai area. But for me, it’s just a few days cruising around Bangkok then I come on home.
So what about that midnight bus to Bangkok, eh? Sounded pretty sketchy right? We roll into “downtown” Ban Krut around 10:30pm and see a deserted street with nothing but one ginormous cockroachy/zicada winged bug thing that files straight onto Tommy’s shirt, and he calmy filcks away without flinching (my hero!).
We listen to the buzzing of street lights, glance at our hand written bus tickets, wonder what the heck they say on them and wonder if we got screwed or not. Slowly, Thai folks start appearing on this block and we feel relieved. The bus is real! And it arrives on time!
The driver helps us load our gear under the side of the bus, then we point to “chakayan” aka our bicycles and he makes a “no no no” gesture. *gulp* The guy that sold us the tickets assured us we could put the bikes on the bus. Tommy tries to grease the driver but the driver does not accept, instead he motions for us to follow him. We move around to the other side of the bus and in moments, our bikes are loaded into the secondary storage area! We’re on board, bikes and all!
We board the bus and find our seats on the very back row. The locals are surprised by our presence, they’re all high school aged Thai kids who are most likely doing the red-eye bus to Bangkok for the long holiday weekend — Buddhist Lent. There’s a lot of giggling and pointing back at us. I sort of feel as though we’re on display. Actually, we were quite literally on display — for some reason the very back row is elevated about 2 feet above the rest of the bus, as though we are guests of honor.
The bus departs on time, making just a couple quick stops outside of town to fill up completely with passengers and we’re on our way. I offer Tommy my seat which actually reclines a bit since he needs to sleep for the conference which is set to begin only a couple hours after we arrive in town. I try a series of pretzel-like contortions to put my body in a comfortable enough position to sleep, and get a couple hours on and off.
This is the bounciest bus of all time, and I think the extreme bouncing is accentuated by our back-row seats. I drift to sleep, we hit a big bump, I wake up and see that several kids have fallen out of their seat into the row and are climbing back up again.
Later, I wake up and we must be outside Bangkok, as there’s just mile after mile of sprawl, mostly commercial and industrial on the side of the highway. We drop off a couple of passengers at what seem like the most random, unofficial dark corners in the middle of nowhere but soon we stop at a huge bus station and every gets off the bus. This must be Bangkok, but we’re earlier than our expected arrival time and I see nothing that says Bangkok anywhere. Finally, I spot a sign in English that says “Bangkok bus station.” I think there are 3 or 4 bus stations in Bangkok, so this is one of them, that narrows down our location a bit.
What ensues is one of our most chaotic and confusing moments on the trip. We get off the bus, onload our stuff. A lady in an official-looking vest appears with a rolling cart and loads our things onto it and has us follow her to a “taxi stand” which is actually just a vast parking lot full of taxis with no real order or system that we can decipher.
Obviously, we need a taxi that can take us, our stuff, and our 2 bikes. A cabbie jumps out of his cab and starts to load our bags into his trunk. He glances at the bikes and then just stops. He rubs his head, looking concerned. He talks to another guy. Nothing happens. We stand our for maybe the next 20 minutes, speaking English, pantomiming, saying our 3 Thai words we know, trying to communicate that the bikes need to come with us.
Various people come and go and speak Thai and we have no idea what’s going on. Tommy goes off to try and hire a larger mini-van but the drivers refuse, “no bicycle.” In the meantime, someone has bowled over our bikes with their push cart, “sorry, sorry.”
Finally, one guy with a mini van pulls up and I tap on his car and say, “this one.” He agrees to take us and our bikes — who knew this portion of the trip would be such a challenge? He bungees the bikes to his roof rack, which made me a bit nervous but we all made it there in one piece.
We’re back again at the All Seasons Siam hotel, where we started our Thailand adventure. Tommy is able to take an hour nap and then we grab breakfast together at the hotel restaurant, then he’s off to his conference.
I go back to sleep for a while. Later, I spend the day getting my bearings and re-acclimating to city life. Lots of commerce, and I sort of fatigue at being sold to — gem stores, cheap clothes, stupid trinkets. I finally find “the largest aquarium in all of South East Asia” which, if you can believe it is in the basement of one of the giant shopping malls. I’ll continue on in another post.
1 year ago