Back to Bangkok for some 'R & R'

A minibus picked us up at 2:30pm along with the American slash Japanese trio and the lone Welsh slash Englishman.  We rattled along at an agonizing speed of 50kph whilst the driver casually pulled over every 2km or so to cram more people in.  We rolled into Surat Thani train station at 4:45pm  and were immediately informed that the computer systems were down and they were only issuing 3^rd class tickets.  We had hoped to catch the 18:22pm train.  At 9:25pm we eventually were issued our tickets and at 9:27pm we boarded the train for Bangkok.  We were greeted by a lady from the food carriage who presented us with a dinner menu (which we declined but we ordered 2 cokes and a bottle of water.  She then, in very broken English, mentioned something about bringing us breakfast and coffee in the morning and then turned and left to fetch our drinks.

We slept relatively well on our bunk beds despite the roaring engines, deafening whilst and numerous stop/starts along the way.  7am sharp we were woken to a bright display of fried eggs on toast, orange juice and steaming hot coffee arranged on the table behind our bunk.  This really was a nice surprise and I almost felt like royalty whilst the other bunk occupants looked upon us with expressions of dismay upon their faces.  Our faces soon took on an expression of horror when we were, inevitably, presented with the bill.  If i had known what the damage was going to be from the start, we would have happily settled for our 1 remaining warm, flat coke and a stale, crumbly Oreo from the day before.

We checked into New Siam I guesthouse – great value for money by the way.  As we had a few days to kill before we headed north we thought that a few days R&R  was in order.  First thing we did was dump our piles of dirty laundry at the front desk to be shipped off for washing.  We spent the days sleeping, reading and exploring the MBK shopping centre where we bought our Gorillapod and enjoyed some western food at Burger King.  We also visited the reclining Buddah at Wat Pho.  We spent the evenings on Khao San Road eating banana and choc pancakes.