13th February 2009

Rather than staying in Bangkok for one night, we decided to do this journey in one hit. This meant us catching a nine hour overnight bus to Bangkok, followed by a further five hour journey to Trat in the early hours. As you can imagine, we were not looking forward to this!

As we arrived at the bus station, we were greeted by the bus driver with the typical Thai friendliness that we love. After loading our back packs onto the bus, we were offered generous sized portions of fresh melon by the driver, delicious!

It was a very hot and sticky night and as the air con was already running, we boarded the bus to get ourselves cool and comfortable. Before we knew it, our bus driver was sitting with us, giving us packets of biscuits and chocolate sweets. Maybe this journey wouldn't be so bad after all!

As our time of departure grew nearer, we realized this bus was pretty quiet. When we were handed some water and juice it became clear that we were the only two passengers on the bus! Excellent, we had the whole bus to ourselves, this was not VIP, this was like having our own chauffer for the night.

Things got even better, after a couple of hours the driver asked if we wanted to join him at the front of the bus. So, we sat up there and watched the world go by, he even let Clare smoke a cigarette out of the window! We decided to make use of the empty seats and spread ourselves out, giving us two seats each. This enabled us to have a little nap and a relatively enjoyable journey.

We were amazed at how busy it was at Mo Chit bus station in Bangkok when we arrived there at 4.30am. There were hundreds of people there getting on and off different buses. This confirmed our decision not to stay in Bangkok and to carry on with the second leg of our journey.

Our bus to Trat was leaving at 6am, so we had ample opportunity to have something to eat to while away the time. This bus however, was not VIP and there was a very obvious difference to the last one. Tired, hungry and with our backs aching, this made for a very unpleasant five hour journey.

Finally, at 11am we arrived at Trat bus station and were soon on a songthaew heading towards the centre of town and to our guest house, Residang.

Our room here was very good, for the price of £5 a night, we even had our own balcony and cable TV. The downside to the cable TV was that the only English speaking channel was The Australian Network, where programmes were repeated every 2 hours! There is only so much Home & Away you can watch!

Our first full day here was spent organising the easiest journey into Cambodia. Luckily our guest house could arrange a straight through ticket from Trat to the the Cambodian beaches of Sihanoukville. For once a journey appeared to be very straightforward, so we booked our tickets for the following Tuesday as we had to yet again arrange another currency, this time US Dollars!

That evening we visited the local night market, which is said to be one of Thailands finest. It was great to eat some tasty Thai street food once again, the fish cakes were some of the best we'd had. But we decided to give the deep fried chicken feet and duck heads a miss!

The only thing left to do after dinner was to find a relaxing bar selling nice & cold beer. The best one we found was right next to our guest house called Basar Garden. We were greeted by the very friendly owner, Noi, who gave us some useful local information, showed us baby fireflies and even gave us a packet of Werthers Originals. Do we really look that old?!

That evening we arranged a day trip to the beach through our guest house owner, for a 10.30am pick up. The next morning we leisurely made our way down to breakfast at twenty past nine, only to be told that our songthaew was booked for half nine! So after a very hurried breakfast, we jumped on our songthaew and headed to ------------ beach. After a 45 minute journey, we arrived at the beach and were pleasantly surprised at how beautiful and tranquil it was. Maybe it's got something to do with it not being in the Lonely Planet guide book! The price for our day trip (£10) included the journey there and back and also the driver waiting all day for us. We spent the day relaxing on the sandy beach, writing our blog and watching the locals picking coconuts from the palm trees. As it was the weekend the beach slowly filled up with Thai families playing in the sea and it was nice not being surrounded by westerners. We had a great lunch here of fried rice on the beach front looking out to sea. We made our way back to the guest house after a thoroughly relaxing day and did our usual night Market visit for dinner followed by a few cold beers at Basar Garden. No Werthers this time though!

On our last day we arranged a change of currency at the local bank, as we needed US Dollars for our trip into Cambodia. As Clare had been finding it hard to cope with her ever growing hair, she decided enough was enough and a visit to the hairdresser was needed. After spotting a Loreal logo and four pounds later, a wash cut & blow dry was complete. Clare was very nervous about getting this done and after putting it off for a few weeks, she need not have worried as it looked very good.

That night we decided to give the night market a miss and we went to a rather fancy restaurant near our guest house. It was called Kluarimklong Cafe and the food was the best we'd had since Chiang Rai. We even had polished cutlery and china plates! Even though we had a very early morning start at 5am the following day, we couldn't resist a few drinks with Noi at Basar Garden before we left. After having a few beers too many we made our way back to our guest house only to find it locked up and in total darkness. This wasn't the first time this had happened, so it was no real surprise to us. The German owner ran a little too much of a tight ship! So we rang the doorbell and a sleepy German came and mumbled at us, we said goodnight and ran up the three flights of stairs giggling. As we are getting pretty laid back with this travelling, we still had yet to pack our back packs. By half one we eventually got to bed, knowing that we had to be up at 4am for our bus ride to Sihanoukville, Cambodia. Good move!