Off the boat, I am approached by some Moto drivers, who offer to take me to the hotel. As I don’t know where it is, and they ask for only 30B, I don’t haggle.
At the hotel (Grand Thani) where the group slept last night, Lucinda has saved me a space in a room, so I am able to get a couple of hours sleep in. However, I am asleep for much of the journey to a town near the Thai-Malaysia border. We are waiting until the next day to do the border crossing.
We learn today that Essex will probably not be rejoining the trip, having left to do some volunteer teaching when we were in Vietnam. He’s a good drinking companion, but unfortunately his fondness for night time singing loudly, crudely and rudely in the hotel at 3am means not everybody on the truck will miss him.
We have a one night stay in a hotel that reminds me of the S21 prison in Phnom Penh, the beds used there as torture racks looking very similar to the ones we will be sleeping in. The toilets look a bit like a torture chamber too.
I join Louise, Mary, Caz, Big John, Tracy, Belgian Sam, and Shay for some drinks in the hotel reception, which looks like a backstreet café. After a while, Lou, Caz and Mary go off to eat, and not long after, Belgian Sam, Shay and I go to supposedly do the same. However, the first, last and every order is beer. We stop at one bar where there is a guitarist singer doing old covers, and we a unilateral decision that this is a Karaoke night. The singer doesn’t seem to mind us hogging his mic too much. I must say though that Shay is a particularly bad singer, drunk or not.
After a bout of shorts ripping, which seems to have become a craze amongst some people, I leave the boys to it, Shay pointing me in the opposite direction to where the hotel is. He is rooming with me tonight.
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