Bus Crash Disaster!!!

We left Koh Chang bright and early on a very, very rainy day. Overall we were lucky on our trip and didn't encounter much rain. It seemed that when it did rain we were spending the day traveling. We caught a songthaew to the ferry port and caught our ferry to the mainland. From there the company that we bought our ticket to Bangkok through picked us up in another songthaew and took us to meet our bus.

At this point we'd been traveling for about 3 months and had spent a lot of time in various buses. When we boarded this one it didn't take me long to notice that our driver didn't seem to know what he was doing. He got lost (or maybe just made wrong turns) three times!!! This is a really common and simple trip- hell, even I know that you need to take highway 3!




There was nothing that could be done about it so we dozed off. Later I woke up and was biding my time reading my novel and listening to my iPod. Suddenly the bus driver ran the bus into the cement divider! My iPod slid off my lap and onto the floor and everyone else was rudely awoken. We all rushed outside to get a better look at the damage. The bus was definintely fucked up.



This delayed our trip quite a bit and I had time to talk to some of the other passengers about our driver. It seemed that the bus had worn brakes and they had noticed this earlier on. It could explain the wrong turns (not being able to stop so instead turning down a different road). No one was hurt and the driver had gone into the divider to avoid hitting the truck in front while stopping for a red light.

Eventually the police came and then a tow truck and we were transferred to a different bus. This bus didn't have enough seats though so I ended up sitting on the floor for the rest of the trip. We arrived in Bangkok about 3 hours later than scheduled but things could have been worse. I suppose with all the traveling we'd been doing we were due for some kind of accident. Thankfully it was nothing like the one a fellow traveler had experienced in Laos when her night bus went off a mountain!