In this modern era of better transportation and communication services, the world today is getting smaller. A ‘tourist’ is a person who performs a journey for the sake of curiosity and the pursuits of pleasure from the novelty of sightseeing in a change environment away from the daily routine back at home. He or she is constantly faced with considerable uncertainty regarding a decision and may have only scanty ideas about the place he  or she visits, most probably due to the limited awareness and collected information. Different alternative of travel such as by air, sea or overland are evaluated against the criteria of wellness, budget and time constraint.

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A Journey Performed

The KTM train station on Keppel Road

From what I had gleaned online, I’d thought it would be as simple as taking the 7.40 a.m train from Singapore to KL, killing 5 hours before taking a sleeper train from KL to Hat Yai and then a 4-hour coach ride to Krabi, ie, paradise, then checking into any hotel for as many days as we wanted before heading up to Bangkok to fly home. Wrong! We spent a total of 33 staggering hours travelling before reaching the “real” Krabi! Getting to Bangkok from Krabi wasn’t a breeze and booking a flight home was just as tumultuous!

It went pretty much like this:

1/1/2009
- 7.40 a.m. to 3.p.m. – train ride from Singapore to KL.
- 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. – time we killed in KL before our train to Hat Yai (no pictures taken as we were more preoccupied and worried about our passports not having been stamped upon our entry into Malaysia – it turned out that it was perfectly normal.)
- 8 p.m. – 11 a.m 2/1/2009 (Thai time, ie, noon, Singapore time) – sleeper train from KL to Hat Yai. Never mind that upon arrival, S and I excitedly stepped out of the train into what looked like a war zone and were harassed by a persistent tout demanding to know where we were heading (as if Hat Yai couldn’t have been our ultimate destination)

Inside the station

After some successful dodging of touts and inquiring at a tour agency, we learned that the bus station where buses departed for Krabi every hour wasn’t at all within walking distance, so we shared a “tuk-tuk” (a pick-up truck, really) with a sweet old lady who spoke some English and made sure we got off first and did not get charged a tourist fare, awww (faces had to be blurred): We reached the bus station half an hour before the next bus was to leave, which was perfect. As planned, the bus took about 4 hours to get to Krabi, but we learned too late that the destination was Krabi town, which was about 20km from those idyllic beaches, namely Ao Nang, we were there to see! It then became clear why there was another fresh set of touts greeting us at the bus station, ppffff… although I was pretty much drained by then, I knew from looking at a map that the 400 baht they were asking for couldn’t have been a decent deal. As S and I were trying to avoid another insistent tout, strangers in pick-up trucks even slowed down to offer to drive us to Ao Nang for 300 baht. By then, thoughts of punching S seemed appealing, for putting me through this and expecting me to know

hatyai-pickup

what to do next. Fortunately, we stumbled upon a lady who happened to be a Thai-English translator (she had a banner outside her house announcing her credentials) so I asked her how we could get to Ao Nang and she showed us the way to a bus station… that got me in a better photograph-taking mood: After another 45 minutes in a pick-up truck (the ride only cost 60 baht!) with 12 other tourists and people the driver picked up along the way, AT LAST we reached Ao Nang at 4pm Thai time (5 pm Singapore time – effectively 33 hours after we boarded the train)!

An excerpt posted by Shilpa
Wednesday, July 8, 2009.