First of all - hope you are reading this with 5 minutes to spare, there’s a lot to cover!
The plan was to travel overland from Bangkok to Singapore so we could get the hell out of Thailand and make our re-arranged flight from Singapore to Sydney. The idea was to get a 36 hour bus from Bangkok to Singapore. That was the plan anyhow.
After consulting with the travel agent, we followed his advice to only book a bus as far as Hat Yai, which is a southern Thai border town, from there we would be able to catch a bus through to Singapore. So we turned up at the bus station as planned at 17:30 Sunday evening for a 18:00 bus. We left Bangkok by bus at 20:30 with Karen’s feelings for something bad beginning to be realised.
Being a Thai bus company they stopped for food/cash exchange (i.e. us tourists give locals as much cash as we can for as little in return as possible) about midnight announcing it as the last stop. What this meant was it was the last stop we would make on THAT bus. As 06:00 we arrived into Surat Thani which is half way between Bangkok & Malayisa which is where is all started to go wrong.
Having been advised only to get Hat Yai tickets and everyone else having KL or Singapore tickets we began to get concerned. At Surat Thani (which was basically the bus company central office) we enquired if we could purchase onward tickets to Singapore. Sold Out. Oh Dear. Being a resourceful country of people they offered us a private mini van from Hat Yai to KL – how nice. First price for five people was 35,000 Baht which is 140 quid per person – we declined. They then countered with an offer for 20,000 for 9 people – 45 quid each which we accepted. So we handed over 90 US dollars which they accepted without paying the difference – mint we thought!
So with onward travel booked (no tickets mind) we boarded a mini van and were off….off to another office it turned out and not KL. At the next office (about 5 mins down the road) they wanted 10 quid each for an express boarder passing Thai/Malaysia – which we begrudgingly paid. So we were off again and this time we travelled south for some time. With about 40km left to Hat Yai we came across flooded roads, but to our advantage only the north side was flooded, so we pushed on. With 6km to go we stopped and things turned a lot worse.
They dropped (literally) us at a service station with the promise a bus was coming north from the border to collect us. To our advantage at this point we had a) other people with us (who had friends at the forward meeting point) and b) a Wi-Fi connection. With an internet connection we booked i) hotel in KL and ii) a flight from KL to Singapore which gave us 36 hours to get from this service station to KL which should be easy as was only meant to be a 6 hour journey.
After waiting for 3 hours and realising we had been dumped we thought through our options. At this point a message from the forward meeting point told us that all the buses had left, so the private minivan we had paid for was gone, we weren’t even at the destination point of our original bus ticket and no express visa service -hey! We hired (5 quid each) another minivan between us all to the border which was the best decision of the day! At the border we crossed (realising no need for express!) and arrived in Malaysia, better still, we had left Thailand! Yay!
Inside Malaysia we hired a taxi to the local town Alor Setar and found more bus companies than I have ever seen in a single bus station. If we had known about this local town (as buses left every half hour for KL & Singapore at very reasonable prices – tenner a ticket!) then we could have avoided all the hassle, KL accommodation, KL-Singapore flights, express visa service, the lot – lesson not to travel without a Lonely Planet. Lesson Learned.
The bus from Alor Setar left half hour late and arrived KL 90 minutes late at 04:00 (34 hours later, 36 hours was to Singapore!) Tuesday morning. We checked into our pre-paid hotel and got some sleep. Spent the afternoon in KL - saw the towers, paddled in a kiddies swimming pool (it was so hot and humid!) and basically veg’ed.
Next leg was our flight from KL to Singapore. This was easy – was only a 35 minute flight!
So now in Singapore. We have a pre-booked hotel which we are in now and we have a flight to Sydney at 09:00 tomorrow morning. So the trip is coming to a fast end. We will write whilst on the plane a blog looking back, so I won’t write yet more here on that subject. But we have got out of Thailand and got to Singapore. The only variable left is BA – if they don’t give me a boarding card in the morning they are getting both barrels and by god they are fully loaded!
Bye for now, Sydney next!
