Never Book Through a Travel Agent

I consider myself a rather savvy traveler; wary of anyone who wants me to pay anything for anything. But when you travel with a group there are things you have to compromise on, and in my case, that is paying more than I would like to travel.

Koh San Road is like a traveler fly-trap. There are millions of travel agents offering flights, buses, trains all over the world. Many of them are scams; all of them are more expensive than simply going to the bus depot/ train station/airport yourself. According to all of the advertisements that you read, you can get a VIP bus to and from Koh Phangan for 7oo bhat (350 each way), but through the agency we used, it was 1200 bhat. We were promised a VIP bus, tickets for the ferry, both ways. No problem. And there weren't any, until we got to the last stop to board the bus back.

Now I am not a luxury traveler in any sense of the word. If I can stay in a room with air conditioning and a feather mattress for 1000 bhat or a room with a rock covered in sheets and half a roof for the wind to blow in for 100, I will choose the latter, but if I pay for the a/c feather mattress, I expect to get a/c and a feather mattress. Same goes for a VIP bus.

The VIP bus we took down was very nice, as I described in an earlier post. But regardless, again, for an 11 hour journey, nothing is very comfortable unless you have a/c and a feather mattress. The bus we took back was more like the rock with sheets.

Instead of a double decker VIP bus, it was a local bus. This means, no bathroom, but instead, 15 minute stops every few hours adding hours to the journey. This means broken seats that move with every jolt of the bus, which are numerous, as there are absolutely no shocks. This means a hole somewhere in the back of the bus the pumps exhaust fumes back into the bus. This means that for 13 hours, you will be in complete misery, wishing you were anywhere, but where you are. And for this we paid 800 bhat.

Because there were few seats left when we bored, I had to sit in the very back, where the seats don't recline. Lucy sat in front of me in a seat that was not connected, to anything, it seemed. Eleanor had the seat across the isle from Lucy, which was the only normal seat between the three of us. Being the wonderfully considerate people they are, each time the bus stopped, we all swapped seats, so that at all times, at least one of us was in a decent chair. Next to me, were a 40 something German couple, who were furious and not at all happy that they had paid for first class accommodations and were stuck with the dregs of Thai buses. The man sat with a cloth over his face the whole time to keep from being axfixiated by the fumes, apart from when he needed to speak to rant about the awful conditions of the bus. Poor Lucy (and all of us in her chair) had to deal with an almost back breaking bounce every time the bus hit a rock, which was at least once every few minutes. To top it all off, for me, I had a minorly sunburnt rear from the beach the day before, causing the mere act of sitting to be excruciating, and no batteries in my cd player to take me away to another world where this bus did not exist.

After the first stop, I got off to use the toilets - toilets in Thailand need their own separate entry - and when I returned, Eleanor was in my seat and as soon as I took my place in Lucy's chair, she handed me two batteries and a bottle of water. I wanted to kiss her.

At the next stop, we switched again and I was finally in the good seat and able to catch some sleep. At 7:30 in the morning we arrived in Bangkok, got a cab and dragged our tired, dirty, miserable bodies home, only to find the house locked tight. I borrowed the neighbor's cell phone and contacted Phanutat who sent Air over to unlock the house and let us in.

Once we had a few hours of sleep under our belts, we headed over to the travel agency to get our money back. Unfortunately, the girl at the agency could not get the bus company to return our money (of course) but offered to give us each 200 baht for our troubles and was supremely nice and apologetic about everything. So in the end we only paid 1000 bhat, 300 more than we would have otherwise and we have some extremely amusing memories (after the fact) which kept us laughing for a good half hour over dinner.