Hopefully this won't take long, because I don't have much time. Low battery. So we carried our baggage down and got set loose on the town. I went to AC 2 for the internet and had rod knaa chicken, the stuff Mikey had the other day. It was pretty tasty. Also lime juice, I ordered a shake, they mixed it up but I didn't really notice, it was tasty tasty juice. So I hung out there pretty much until it was time to head out, went over to the pier, we sat around the pier for a long time, people there trying to get us to buy food, looking at amusing pictures from the other night (so, so bad...) and so on. Eventually the boat showed up, I slept most of the ride, also talked to Zypy some about the morality of alcohol which was interesting. Got off the boat, borrowed 5 baht from Mikey to use the bathroom, and met this crazy Welshman. I mean, seriously crazy. John had made a friend on the boat it seems. But I'll add to this with info about him later, I have some written down on him, don't want to forget other things. Eventually the bus arrived, we got on, Nate sat next to me... and the crazy Welshman and his girlfriend sat behind me. Dammit. So that was uh, an interesting bus ride. That got us to the train station, where we had about 4-5 hours to do nothing. I sat around the station guarding for the first hour while others ate, my headache increasingly annoying, talking mostly to Mikey and Matt. So many dogs, unsurprisingly. Around 8:30 I headed out to dinner, pad se-ew with chicken, water, and most importantly, free wireless. They also had free showers, which I should have taken advantage of in retrospect, but didn't. So I got some stuff done, Nate talked to his parents a little, Mike got some stuff done, Matt got some stuff done, and then I farted around talking to people and such for a while. I had to come back to the train station to find Anh about a eh-hem certain picture, but she was out getting gatorad for Becky. By the time she returned I found out she had already taken care of it, and not to lecture her – which I wasn't going to anyway, but yeah. So I headed back up to the diner place, the people there were SO nice, they offered to let us keep our baggage there and just relax and sit there until our train came, so nice. We didn't, too much effort to move the baggage, but I did stay there on my netbook until about 11, hence the battery now. It was sort of a nice counter to the “BUY MY STUFF BUY MY STUFF BUY MY STUFF” of a lot of Koh Tao, and I suppose Bangkok too. Then we got on the train, I slept (poorly), we woke up a station early, I lay down in someone else's cot for a bit because we had all shifted, and we got off the train. Onto rocks/large gravel, and just above a disgusting trash pit. It was kind of like when my mom and dad got dropped off literally on the side of the highway by a bus, there wasn't really anything where we were. But we walked over to where the actual train station started, slept on some benches (I only found out this morning my bench was actually 2 benches put together, which combined with the fact that it's a ceramic tile bench too narrow for my body and that I used my shirt as a pillow instead of my coat for some reason explains why I slept so poorly), woke up, sat around a bit, went over and got 6 little fried dough balls for 5 baht, and saw a cool little playground at the train station. They have a swing shaped like a barge with a dragon head at the front, it's nifty.

Thursday, January 28th, roughly 7:30 AM local time