On our last night in Koh Phangan, we returned from Guys bar at 8am, had one last, amazing breakfast at Bamboo Hut and caught a boat back to Haad Rin beach. Haad Rin was a ghost town, it was quite eerie and strange. This was a few days after NYE so most tourists had left. It was almost spooky how much the atmosphere had changed. We left Koh Phangan from the Sunset port and caught a boat to Koh Samui. After a long debate and slight disagreement, we decided to give Koh Samui a miss and only used it as a stop over. We planned to go island hopping in the Trang province - something which isn't explored by the masses. Trang islands are located on the west coast of Thailand, in the Andaman sea. This was where the Boxing Day tsunami hit in 2005.
From Koh Samui, we caught a ferry to Don Reap for 150TB and this is where we went wrong. We should have booked a combined ferry and mini bus ticket to take us to Trang. However, we decided to do both separately and catch a mini bus once we were in Surrathani. Big mistake. We were ripped off big time. Combined ferries and mini bus tickets to Trang were selling for around 600TB. Instead we ended up paying 150TB Ferry, 100TB bus to Surrathani, 750TB mini van to Trang. It's quite painful thinking about it. The journey to Trang wasn't the best either. Our bus broke down so we had to swap buses, we were then scammed in Surrathani and the mini van nearly drove off without us resulting in us being the only Westerners cramped in the back. Yes, it was all very traumatising. However we did make it to Trang by nightfall.
Trang isn't a well known tourist destination. It's a business city where the locals don't speak an inkling of English and there around 8 guesthouses in total. It took us a while to find a tuk tuk driver who could understand where we wanted to go and once we were dropped by the station it took us longer to find a suitable guesthouse within budget. For me, Trang was scary. Like proper nerve wrecking scary. Most of the guesthouses we checked out made us feel uneasy. I'll give you an example: the cheapest guest house we found was 150TB a night. This price included a shared bathroom, pitch black corridors, polystyrene walls, a blind dog and a nearly dead woman on a bed in reception. I kid you not, I think she was dead. She was just skin and bones and her eyes had rolled back into her head, it was so disturbing. The housekeeper looked almost offended (and clueless) when we ran away (for our own safety) from her dank and chilling guest house. Another guesthouse we looked at could've easily been a postitute den. On the ground floor (which was apparently a reception) was a large group of Thai men playing poker. When we enquired about a room, this old guy showed us up the stairs while touching and grabbing at Tigers arms, shoulders and back. He led us up several floors and we felt more uneasy each step we took. In the end we didn't bother checking out the room, we wanted to get out there as fast as possible. These kind of encounters reoccurred at several guesthouses, it was all really creepy. In the end we were happy to pay double (650TB) for a room in a safe, secure and inviting hotel.
All creepy guys and guesthouses aside, Trang does have an amazing night market. The food market was the best we've been to in Thailand. There was such an array of dishes from smoked duck and rice to churros to Vietnamese pork rolls. It was all so yummy and so so cheap. We shared loads of dishes which allowed us to try loads of different street food.
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