17 May 2011... continuing an all-night drive into 18 May 2011
We are through with our visit to Safari World by 5 PM, and it is time to look for someplace to eat. When in doubt, the best place to check out is a 7-Eleven Store. You can get ready-packed sandwiches and croissants, pastries and patties, and ready-mix coffee with free availability of hot water. One can also get a bowl of instant noodles and add hot water to it, to have an filling meal. Thais eat out habitually, and half the population doesn't have a functional kitchen at home!
We find a 7-Eleven next to a market full of little stalls selling sausages, meat balls, noodles, fruits, fresh juices and a variety of ready-to-eat stuff that we don't know the names of. We pick up our dinner-on-the-go in the car, try to set the address of the street in Krabi where our hotel is (and in the process learn of some very strange street names), give up, set the destination as just 'Krabi', and drive depending solely on the GPS's inputs.
An hour later, we are out of city limits, cruising along a eight-lane highway, with, believe it or not, ALL cars on dipped beam.
In fact, during our almost-2000-km drive this time, with two overnight runs (Bangkok-Krabi and Phuket-Bangkok), I have seen not more than 2 cars approach me on high beams, and they have dipped promptly when I flashed my beams. And I have not used the horn even once reflexively - just once have I blown the horn, intentionally to hear how it sounds, on an empty stretch of highway.
Our first stop is Petchaburi (we call it our LILO or liquid-in-liquid-out stop).
First stop gets us our first roadblock. A 150 km out of Bangkok, fuel station attendants do not understand one word of English. Fuel I can explain, gesticulate, and make them understand that I need a full tank. Now how on earth do I ask for directions to the loo? Toilet? washroom? Display the little finger? Short of demonstrating the process, nothing I do makes them understand. Fortunately another driver points the place out to us. Across Thailand, it is customary for ALL fuel pumps to have a clean toilet marked separately for men & women. Most also have a 7-Eleven or Tesco Lotus store on the premises, working round the clock, where one can grab a cup of coffee or soup.
Have not expected such excellent roads all through, since my idea of a Rural Road in India is entirely different from that in Thailand! Maps from Google had shown that the road after Surat Thani is narrow, and I am a little wary because it's called a Rural Road. But, wait... what's rural about this? It's a 4-lane undivided road, as smooth as any expressway! The traffic discipline and steady speeds see us cover ground well, despite my backing off after midnight to a constant 85-90 km/h, to both conserve fuel and not arrive in the middle of the night.
It is 4:30 AM, and quite dark, as we roll into Krabi. A lady doing duty at a 7-Eleven pointed us the way to our hotel, while (what looked and sounded like) an European couple carried on a drunken brawl between themselves on the footpath. One more interesting thing to note in Thailand - all-night pumps and stores are often manned by 2-3 women (no men at all) throughout the night. The place we had booked earlier on Agoda is called Somkiet Buri Resort, and no amount of reading reviews prepared us for walking into a tropical jungle in the dark! Mercifully, a clerk sleeping at the reception checks us into our rooms at that early hour (5 AM), and we are dead to the world till noon.