After about 30 minutes of driving we were dropped off at a building and told to wait for the next van, we were pretty shattered, a change of van, means a change of seat. Never the less, we sat, watching kittens play and waited. Another half an hour later our van pulled up, we quickly jumped in and sorted out where we wanted to sit only for our new driver to say “no worries, only 2 today”. I assured Justin that surely we had not heard him right and to not get too excited, we didn’t have this big, comfy van all to ourselves. But as the driver pulled away with only us in his van, we couldn’t help but celebrate.
We were spread out in this van for 4 hours, before we were dropped off at another building and told to wait for the next van. We sat down and ordered ourselves a hotdog on a stick before I noticed people loading into a van, after confirming with what seemed like the only person in the building who could remotely understand English, we jumped into the van packed full of locals for another 2 hours.
Finally we had arrived in our final destination, we took the short 15-minute walk to Morakot Hotel and settled into our room, which, considering Chumphon doesn’t see many western tourists, was pretty nice. It was already pretty late, so we failed to sort out a bike for the night; instead we sorted out with a lady down the road to hire a bike from her for the following day. We walked down to a local open-air restaurant and chilled there for the evening.
The following day it was hot… I mean bloody hot. We stayed tucked up in our hotel, packing our bags and waiting for the temperature to drop, only venturing out for a huge lunch at Poema Restaurant. In the afternoon we headed out to the supermarket to grab some food for our bus trip the following day, and only just missed the huge storm that was brewing overhead. We headed out that night to another local restaurant and to be honest, we got a little bit drunk, there really is nothing like cheap, strong, delicious cocktails.