Queuing for parking

This morning I walked to the beach to get the boat back to the mainland. The boats on this route are smaller and faster than the ferries I was on before. There are 3-4 companies and all the boats leave at the same time so there were a lot of people. As when I arrived, a small taxi boat takes around 12-16 people at a time from the beach out to the pontoon. This is the queue of boats waiting to dock and unload their passengers. On the pontoon they identify who is with which company and load, first the luggage, and then the passengers onto the speed boats. Seating is very cramped. Everyone gets a life jacket to wear. It was bumpy, especially when we got away from the islands and the weather deteriorated. The sea rapidly changed colour from greenish to slate grey as stormy clouds rolled in. The boat was bouncing off the waves and crashing down again. And there seemed to be quite a lot of debris in the water that the driver was having to swerve to avoid.

I was happy to get to the mainland, both to get off the boat and find an ATM that my card worked in since the brand of machines on Koh Lipe was blocked by my bank. I had a ticket for a minibus to another island, Koh Lanta. It turned out to be two different minibuses. The first one went as far as Trang bus station and I had just enough time to eat some noodle soup from a food stall in the bus station before the next bus left. Koh Lanta is much closer to the mainland. It’s two islands. The first you get to on a car ferry that moves at snail’s pace across what’s essentially a very wide river, and for the second, there’s a bridge.


The bus dropped me a couple of minutes walk from my guesthouse just as it started to pour with rain. It’s right on the beach so after that rain stopped I went for a wander on the beach.