Tales From a Female Traveller

You put a toilet seat pillow on my head and tell me I look stupid

http://au.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-a6zLd1M9bqXYFufi8VqDDClTLg--?cq=1

Hey all,

Well, 5 days ago we headed off on our bus trip north to Chiang Mai for our Trek... and boy, what a trip. We had to be at the TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand) at 8am so our Travel Agent could prepare us for our trip so we got up at 6 to make sure we gave ourselves enough time to get into main Bangkok and onto the bus. It took a while to flag down a cab from our HI but eventually we got one and thought that everything would be fine. Oh how wrong we were.

We must have gotten THE worst cab driver in all of Thailand because he took us WAY out of the city and then back in.. and we knew we were being literally "taken for a ride" but could do absolutely nothing about it and ended up paying a zillion Baht in tolls... you pay to get on the highway and you pay to go along it and then you pay to get off it.. "no problem.. 40 Baht... you pay". So then he takes us to the bus station instead of the TAT and we had run all the way back to it with 15 kilo packs on our backs because it was 8:10 and the bus was leaving at 8:40...
We finally found our TAT (there are about 5 different one's all along the same stretch of road) and our Agent was there waiting for us with a cab to take us to the bus.

The traffic was horrendous and our cab driver was running late for another pick up so everyone was in a rush... we get to the bus stop (which actually turned out to be another travel agent which issued the bus tickets. We're sitting there patiently and there were these "bus attendants" (like flight attendants) who just didn't seem all that right...
"Is that a man?" I whispered to Byron...
"I don't want to know." he says..
But they were SO convincing I just wasn't sure... until they spoke to us... then it was VERY clear that these pretty "women" weren't women at all and I had to contain the moment of my enlightenment with stifled laughs.

So anyway.... this whole time we had been feeling like this whole trip that we had paid for was a complete scam because we were being taken from place to place.. the next stop was a tiny little backwater bus station under the highway bridge where we were told to board a bus that wouldn't start and without a/c... and until someone told us otherwise we sat and sweltered.

Eventually we were shifted onto the RIGHT bus and off we headed to Chiang Mai.. by this time it was 12pm and we were supposed to have departed at 8:40am. Everything seemed to be going great and our ripped off feeling was starting to lift when the bus broke down at a place that had no name.. we were stuck there for something like 2 hours and the bus driver himself took off his drivers uniform and was in there fixing the bus himself. Now, you'd think that fixing a bus would require a great deal of mechanical knowledge right? Guess again.. turns out an empty water bottle is the solution for just about anything in Thailand... because that's what they used to put the a/c back together so the bus could continue its journey! Bloody brilliant!!

The bus ride took so long that I'm pretty sure we started to get delirious because on the last stretch Byron and I got the giggles and carried on like a pair of 11 years olds and amused ourselves with the "toilet seat pillows". (would attach pics but this internet is crap and wont let us) Eventually though, we DID make it to Chiang Mai.. only 5 hours late!!!

We were past being tired and decided to visit Chiang Mai's (pronounced Chang My) night markets where we got to see Australia lose 1-0 to Italy through a time penalty.... and if I cared about soccer I might have been upset...lol... at midnight we'd seen enough and had to get up early to start our Trek so we headed back to the B.M.P. (Backpacker Meeting Place)... bit of a mistake.. we almost were attacked by a dog that sounded mightly rabid... so at the last count.. I have Malaria and came very close to contracting Rabies as well.. next up.. Denghe Fever.

posted by Lucyspeak @ 12:16 am