ok, I guess it's time to try and update my blog, so here goes...

After finishing my PADI Open Water and Advanced Open Water courses in Ko Tao, I set about trying to figure out how to get to Singapore as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Being an idiot I left it until the day before I travelled to ask about booking tickets, and of course was told that the trains were all fully booked! The only other option... you've guessed it... the bus!! Not just the bus; actually the proposed route was 8 hours on a "night boat", follwed by 5 hours in a "mini-van" followed by 20 hours in a "VIP bus". That's a total of 33 hours continuous travelling!!...

So anyway, I set off in the evening for the night boat with fairly high expectations... The woman in the travel agents had told me that the night boat was very comfortable and I could get a good nights sleep on it, so when I arrived at the pier I was a bit surprised to find the only boat moored there was an old wooden fishing boat.... But I figured maybe it was like Dr Who's Tardis, small and dull on the outside, big and flashy on the inside. I was wrong. Inside, the deck was just like...well, a deck i suppose.. you know, bits of rope, boxes, barrels, anchors etc etc.... then I found out that the sleeping quarters were actually upstairs, and I stepped back from the brink of despair momentarily. Then I climbed the ladder to the top deck. Upstairs was an area about 5mx10m with hard sleeping mats layed down the 2 sides of the "room". The cieling was only about 1m high, and there was small hard pillows spread along the edges of each side of the floor. Each person had about 2 feet of space in which to sleep, and the heat was unbearable. Now all of this may sound a bit harsh, but actually none of what I have just described was really a problem. I mean all you really need is a piece of floor big anough to lie on and soft enough not to bruise... no, the problem wasn't the heat or the beds, the problem was to 10 foot swells that we were sailing through! As the storm raged outside, the boat rocked from side to side to 50 degree angles, causing everyone to slide out of their beds and across the floor. As well as this, the front of the boat (over which I was sleeping) kept lurching up a wave and then crashing down into the next trough. It was so bad it was almost funny. The floor didn't stop moving for at least 24 hours after I got off the boat!

Right, I'm trying to write this whilst ppl are watching "Sex and the City" in the same room and to be honest it's impossible not to listen to it, making it impossible to write anything worth reading, so i'm gonna give up.... maybe I'll continue later.... :)
posted by Billy at 1:57 PM