After dropping off our passports to have our visas taken care of, we wandered around Chinatown (does every city in the world have a Chinatown?) wasting time until our bus arrived. It was Sunday, so most of Chinatown was closed. We ended up getting a taxi back to Banglamphoo and drinking beer and playing dice in a sidewalk cafe for most of the afternoon.

After dinner, we headed back to the place where the bus was supposed to pick us up. Around 7pm, we were told the bus was a two minute walk away and that we would have to walk to it. The bus had two-stories and air conditioning, with a big screen TV and reclining seats bus. We thought we had it made.

Within five minutes of leaving, however, a movie started blasting through the speakers. United 93. Lauren and I looked at each other. They had to be kidding.

But they weren’t. I tried to sleep through the movie but it was incredibly loud and listening to the screams seemed worse than just watching the movie. In the end, it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought it would be. Not to be callous, the whole movie was painfully corny. The terrorists were wearing red bandannas (is this based in fact?). At one point, a passenger and someone from Verizon say the Lord’s Prayer together. And there was a lot of stuff about scrambling planes that I think, since the release of the movie, has been found to be inaccurate. (There was a Vanity Fair article about this.)

The movie finally ended. And a second movie, Stealth, began.

Around midnight, we stopped and one of the drivers or someone else came on and said, “Last stop. This is the last stop.” Everyone was confused, as we were all told we’d arrive in our the ports to leave for our various islands around 6am. It turned out, this was the last stop before that stop.

We asked when we would arrive for the boat for Koh Toa, the island Lauren and I were heading to.

“4 a.m.,” he said.

The man was very intent on everyone getting off the bus, though, and after a few minutes we realized that his intent was to get us to buy food at the food stand where we were stopped. Everything there was exorbitantly expensive (for Thai standards, at least).

Lauren got some crackers for us to use with the peanut butter we were carrying, and then we both got back on the bus.

Someone else asked the driver when we’d arrive for the boat to Koh Tao.

“6 a.m.” he said.

Hmmmmm…

I set my watch alarm for 5:45 am and Lauren and I went back to sleep.

Around 3 a.m. we woke to a new driver yelling, “Koh Tao, Koh Tao!”

We grabbed our stuff and ran down the stairs. They already had our bags off the bus and were dumping them near a small shelter with a picnic table. It was just off the highway, and there was nothing but highway to be seen.

“This is for Koh Tao?” I kept asking. He nodded.

Fortunately, we weren’t alone at the shelter. A young British couple and an Irish family with two young children were standing under the shelter. Their bus had dropped them off here hours earlier. They had taken turns wandering through the small desolate town trying to figure out what to do next. By the time we got off the bus, they were in a frenzy, but figured that another bus would soon be on the way. None of our travel agents had mentioned this small detail.

A Thai man on a motorcycle kept offering to take people over to the pier for 100 Baht. Everyone turned him down.

Just five minutes later, the bus arrived. We got on it and waited for another 30 minutes for a last bus to arrive.

The bus took us to a depot where we could buy food and beer and where we’d wait for the morning to come and the boats to take us to the islands. Lauren and I ate banana pancakes and played more dice. We struck up a conversation with a Scottish couple who had been traveling for a little over a month. The woman told us not to go to Cambodia (too much tragedy) and that we were buying expensive beer (it’s cheaper on the smaller roads just off Banglamphoo).

6a.m. came and went. Finally, people started moving towards the buses. We got back on and after a 10 minute drive, we arrived at the pier. None of the boats looked like the speedboat we were promised.

We boarded a nice looking boat and discovered that the speedboat had already left, at 6am. Our bus was too late. Instead of an hour and a half ride to the island, we were going to face a three hour ride. To top things off, the comfortable seats inside cost an extra 40 Baht.

Lauren and my stubborness came out. We refused to pay the extra money and went downstairs to the less comfortable, hard plastic seats. There were very few people down there, so we were able to stretch out across entire rows of seats and sleep.

We awoke freezing because of the air conditioning. We made our way back to the deck and saw Koh Tao approaching. Finally, we thought, we’ve made it.