Well That Was Interesting

We journeyed from Sukhothai to Ayutthaya the other day... And it was a journey indeed.

We booked what we assumed (that is what the ticket said, after all) would be an easy 4 hour ride between towns. While we had good luck last time arriving after dark and saving some daylight to use before we left, we decided this time we would take off early in the morning as per our norm, in order to arrive at our destination with daylight remaining - which certainly can save some headaches.

That turned out to be quite fortuitous.

Thai buses, if we haven't expressed this before, are a bit of an adventure even on a good day, and this was not one of them. The bus drivers, it seems from our perspective, are lords of their own domain. Frequent stops at the side of the road to pick up or drop off strange and sketchy packages, envelopes, or whatever else are frequent. Mom's birthday? How about some flowers! etc... Sometimes the stop is just so the driver can use the toilet, other times he may decide he's hungry and stop for dinner - all while a full load of passengers wait.

The scheduled four hour trip quickly (or not so quickly, as the case may be) turned into a six hour trip. From there things went rapidly down hill.

It seems this driver had an arrangement with a group of locals - namely, he would leave us at their particular stretch of highway in the general vicinity of our destination, but not within walking distance. This is opposed to, you know, taking us to the bus station. As a result of this arrangement, these locals would have exclusive rights to charge whatever rate they deemed appropriate in order to pay the driver his due, and make a nice cut of profit for themselves. In this case, seven to ten times the going rate of driving that particular distance.

Since we are there with our bags on the side of the highway, clearly with no other options for leaving said highway, you really have no bargaining power when they tell you of this astronomical price. Keep in mind - this bit of the trip should be wholly unnecessary to begin with, as we should have been left in town at the bus station.

Did I mention it had started to rain?

What happens after you agree to pay their ransom and get into their truck, well, that's still up in the air. Also, they don't speak English, and are unlikely to know where it is you are trying to go.

After quite a bit of discussion, I was able to relay to them the general vicinity of where we needed to go. Having never been there of course, we didn't know exactly ourselves. An address, which we had and clearly showed them, provided no relief to the communication issues - the locals are unlikely to have a map, or know how to read it if they did. Indeed, upon showing them our google map of the area, they were just as boggled as before.

So! On the plus side it WAS still daylight, despite our rather lengthened journey, and after swallowing the bitter pill of what we would have to pay to get into town (more than a nights lodging in a private room!) we threw our bags in the back, and hopped into the truck.

I needn't really say how awkward the silence was in that truck... We both furiously angry at having been taken advantage of in such a way - he fully aware of what he was doing to us. Also, he still only had a vague sense of where we should be going, and we had no idea if that's where we were going. Right.

Well long story short, after a longer than it should have been drive, a few stops to talk to some other locals and eventually convince one of them to make a phone call to the place we were staying, we made to our new place. Alive. And, with only the relatively minor inconveniences of having lost most of a day, and some money.

I'll chock that one up in the "win" category, of the "You win some, you lose some" game. We are still here to write this, after all.