Trip to Thailand

We made it to Thailand!  The trip here was loooong and slightly painful at times.  As always, there is bound to be something interesting on 20 hour bus trips.  We left Penang on Monday evening at 4 pm after our passports were returned with our Thai visas.  Slightly before we left, Jimmy (our guesthouse owner in Penang) got in a huge fight with a local guy who came by asking if there were "girls" at the Love Lane Inn... aka: Is this a brothel?  Eric and I looked on as Jimmy cussed the guy out in Malay and told him he would call the police.  We asked Jimmy about the incident after the man left and he told us people come by all the time asking for "girls" or "boys." Apparently the guesthouse/hotel directly across the street from Love Lane Inn was a brothel at one point recently.  The police have raided the Wan Hai Hotel several times to try and shut down the prostitution trade there, but Jimmy said there is still some sketchy business going on.  

Anyway, we were picked up by a mini bus that took us to the Thai border which took 4 hours.  I sat next to an old man with one leg, a long braid cascading down his back, wearing an open shirt, covered in tattoos.  Every 30 minutes he lifted up his shorts, took out a Nalgene-type water bottle, and peed in the bottle.  We finally got to Hat Yai, our final destination on the mini bus, which is just across the Thai border.  Unfortunately we hadn't converted any money in to Thai Baht yet, so we had to pay for the bus in US dollars, which took some haggling for them to let us do that.  We got on the bus which goes from Hat Yai to Bangkok at 8 pm and the trip took 12 hours.  To top off our problems already, under our seat was a cat box and a cat which meowed non stop for the first hour of the trip.  The owner of the cat, who ended up being our seat neighbor, finally took the cat out and held it for the rest of the trip. 

After a long and sleepless night, we got to the bus station in Bangkok.  We had some coffee, regrouped, and got a taxi to the place where the farm owner, Neil, told us to take the minibus to his house in Bang Prah.  We ran around for an hour with our backpacks on, sweating like crazy, trying to find the right minibus.  Everyone seemed to point in a different direction.  We got on the mini bus and made it to Chonburi area, near where the farm is.  Then we found two motor bike taxis to take us to the meeting point we had decided on with Neil.  Made it! 

Neil picked us up and we went back to his house where we showered and napped for a bit.