Today begins the first day of Meg s and my 9 day road trip during our Christmas break! We had both been really looking forward to our adventures around the Andaman Coast! As teachers, we were thankful to be able to get 9 days off. This is how my fabulous travel buddy and I chose to spend our days:

Eve of the 24^th  -Board the night bus to Krabi
Wed Dec 25^th    -Day in Krabi
Thurs Dec 26^th  -Day at gorgeous Koh Phi Phi
Fri Dec 27^th       -Commute to Phuket
Sat Dec 28th     -Professional beach bums at Surin Beach, Phuket
Sun Dec 29^th     -Chilaxing at Hata Kata Beach, Phuket
Mon Dec 30^th   -5 hour bus ride to Trang Town, Scooter rentals
Tues Dec 31^st   -Death defying day of scootering around Trang / Evening bus back to Bangkok
Wed Jan 1^st      -Arrive back at the Bangkok bus terminal only to see lots of POLICE and traffic…

[Apologies for my lack of blogging. I have plans of posting blogs to fill you in on the “gaps” from the past 5 months. I am an extreme procrastinator and STILL have so many photos to sort and edit through! I really hope to become more active on BROWN EYED GIRL in 2014. Thanks for sticking with me. I brought my laptop along during the vacation and was able to jot down notes every day of our travels. I had planned to blog and post daily but clearly that did not go as planned. I really had not taken into account all the commuting exhaustion and just how lacking the internet would be!!]

As soon as school ended at 3:30pm I excited walked home to grab my packed bags.  In order to meet Megs at our arranged meeting place I had to catch a songtow, ride on the Railink for 30 minutes and then transfer over to the BTS for one stop. We met up at the Victory Monuement BTS stop and hopped into a taxi towards the Southern bus depot (Sai Tai Mai). Even though traffic was bad at this hour we arrived with plenty of time to spare before our bus would depart at 8:00pm.

I set my iphone to capture this picture because we were so clueless as to what the ticket lady was trying to tell us…

It took a while for the ticket agent to figure out how to print off two tickets and give them to us. There was some confusion and a bit of waiting around before we were given two tickets and a receipt.  The bus left shortly after 8:15pm and we were both excited to be starting our vacation. There was a little mix up in the seating arrangements when we first arrived on our bus. The seating attendant struggled to locate our seats on our tickets. At one point it seemed like we might be on the wrong bus or people were in our seat. Luckily it was sorted out and we were able to catch some sleep on our 12 hour bus ride from Bangkok to Krabi Town. We were pleasantly surprised that our tickets were less than we had budgeted and we were provided with beverages and snacks on the bus. We say snacks as opposed to a meal because the portion sizes were not comparable to any meal we would be satisfied with.

I promise, IN TIME I will post an entry for each day of the trip.
Thanks for reading and please keep checking back for updates.

xo
Amanda Sumalee