The Backpacking Housewife. Janice Horton

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       Chapter 4

       Railay

      The next morning, I’m saved the expense of an expensive taxi by the free hotel shuttle bus to Suvarnabhumi airport. Once there, I find transiting through the domestic avenues rather easier than navigating the international ones. At the gate for the Krabi flight, I see Summer waiting.

      Today Summer looks all bohemian and quite beautiful in a pair of light-cream flowing harem trousers and a white vest that shows off her deeply tanned skin. Her long dark hair is loose about her shoulders. On her arms, she wears lots of jangly bangles. In contrast, I’m wearing a baggy white cotton blouse and my old jeans that this morning I’d decided to turn into knee-length cut-off shorts. I’ve scraped back my humidity frazzled hair and tied it into a tight chignon, the way I’d always wore it at home. I had thought I’d looked chic as I left the cool ambiance of the hotel but now, having spent almost an hour travelling in a hot minibus with a dozen other people, I feel both overheated and underdressed at the same time.

      I rush over to greet Summer and I’m full of apologies in case I’m late.

      But she tells me our flight isn’t even in yet and it might have been delayed. I offer to buy us both coffee and a muffin while we wait. A couple of hours later, our flight departs and we arrive in Krabi to sky-high temperatures and blue skies and body-soaking, pulse-pounding humidity.

      ‘How far away is it to the boat?’ I ask. My heavy denim shorts are now sticking to my thighs and chafing me uncomfortably, and sweat from my hair is trickling down my beetroot-red face.

      ‘It’s about half an hour on the bus.’ Summer replies, coolly taking it all in her stride.

      We walk past the taxi rank, ignore all the touting drivers, and we buy a bus ticket each for just a few baht from the transport office in the arrivals hall to take us from the airport to the pier. Soon afterwards, we are escorted to a minibus already packed full of passengers and we’re ready to set off. It’s hot and stuffy and crowded. Even with the air-con flowing it’s quite suffocating on the bus. But everyone seems to be in a jolly mood and so there is lots of laughter and enthusiasm for seeing the famous Railay Beach.

      In the bus with us are several young couples and a group of five young lads. The lads all seem to know each other well. Summer immediately gets chatting with them. They tell us how they all started out travelling solo around South East Asia but had met up in Vietnam and for the past few weeks had been travelling together. Three of them, Chad, Rick, and Brad, are loud chatty Americans with the same short, choppy haircuts, who all seem very keen on outdoing each other to impress Summer. Another lad is German and called Peter who, being European, speaks very good English. The fifth fellow in the group is a Brit who introduces himself as Nate, but the others immediately tell us they’ve nicknamed him Prince Harry, because of his short red hair and clipped British accent that makes him sound rather royal.

      Poor Nate. To compensate for his poshness, I notice how he’s finishing all his sentences with ‘man’ or words like ‘gross/cool/awesome’ to try to fit in with the laidback Americans.

      I guess they’re all around the same age as my sons and suddenly I feel rather old.

       What must they think of someone my age backpacking around Thailand?

      The topic of conversation between the lads is entertainingly all about which of their bus journeys across Asia has so far been the longest and the smelliest (sixteen hours from Hue to Hanoi with someone who had vomited and missed the sick bag) and how many times they’ve all had food poisoning (at least twice each with bad seafood being the main culprit) and whether Chang or Leo or Singha is the best beer in Thailand (Leo, apparently, and then Chang and then Singha). Then there was the big debate on whether we were all going to СКАЧАТЬ