The Perks of Being Laura

Our contiki tour is over :( as with almost every aspect of my life I was painfully anti-social and ended the 9 days knowing about 5 people's names... social skills on point. But it was really good nonetheless! We had to leave our bags outside our room at 7, waking a very hungover lauren up was a struggle and i honestly worried she'd died in the night. We had our final buffet breakfast and boarded the bus to go back to Phuket. It was funny to realise that we're experienced travellers compared to many of our group who were panicking about their bags getting squashed etc, we've had un air conditioned buses and our huge rucksack under our seats and remained unfazed. Weeeird.

After a stop we arrived at the airport at 11 and a man rang out hotel for us to get picked up. I chose this hotel/guesthouse because of the good quality website, free airport pick up and drop off and the English owner meaning we could easily sort this. Regrets. The guy was beyond weird; he didn't know our booking despite a lengthy email discussion and then came to pick us up, said really rudely to me 'and why are there three of you when you've booked a room that in no way can accomodate more than 2 people'. Like woah mate what happened to the customer always being right?? Which yanno, i was, as he had literally told me we could have an extra bed in the room. When i pointed this out he suddenly seemed to remember and his tone changed dramatically. He was very odd though and it was a relief to only stay one night.

He drove us to the middle of what looked like rural Thailand, the doors locked, and at that point I did start to think that if he killed us no one would have any idea where we'd been going. Fortunately he did take us to a legitimate guesthouse and showed us our very nice, quaint room. It was very nice, couldn't complain, aside from referring to his wife to her face as 'the woman'. Same.

We ventured into the local area for some food, found a road with some shops about a 15 minute walk away which wasn't ideal but we were only staying there to be able to get to the airport. I had some questionable food from 7/11 (tuna and salmon roasted sandwich anyone?) and the others had some noodles in a cafe before heading back. We'd anticipated a quiet evening but not as quiet as it was; the tv lost signal around 6 (suspiciously soon after the others asked the man if they had dvds for us to borrow as the room had a DVD player in it which he wasn't impressed about), the Wi-Fi also went down for the next 12 hours, and at about 8 our toilet got blocked. My attempts at plumbing (aka flushing it) did not help; it seemed to bring up previously flushed waste. I won't go into detail but it was not pretty.

Fortunately our flight was early so we went to sleep at 9. Oh forgot to mention a classic moment: about 10 minutes after checking in we were just lying on our beds scrolling through our phones when there was a sudden round of heavy gun fire very close by; i half expected the man to appear at our door. We never did find the source but as far as I know none of the other guests were killed. In his defence the man was very nice the next morning dropping us off, but when he asked if everything was okay I thought it was safer to say it was than risk a fight. An interesting day to say the least.

Laura x