The journey home

Well, my busride back home was... interesting to say the least. I caught a mini-van to Hat Yai (near the Thai border) within half an hour of recieving my visa. The ride was long and soooo hot. When we got to the border the immigration officers were on a mission to make life difficult. They kept making us give them bribes to let us in... so annoying. We eventually had to leave some guy at the border coz they wouldnt let him through. So I arrived in Hat Yai quite late and checked into the ghettoist hotel in all of Thailand. It was soooo crusty with a squat toilet. But they booked me onto a big bus back to Samui so I could be back in time to meet my friend Vern at the airport. The busride was almost disastrous. I very nearly missed it because my motor-taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong bus company. Then I had my own two seats and some woman chose to sat next to me, in spite of the fact that the entire back half of the bus was empty. Then she took her baby from her husband and spend half the journey pointing at me and calling me "farang" which made the baby cry.. awesome. Then she left and I put my feet up on the seat next to me so I could sleep, only to have some new guy actually sit on my feet. I made a dramatic act of looking at the empty back of the bus and flailing my arms about to show my distaste but to no avail. To make matters worse the woman behind me started throwing up in a plastic bag and her baby was sticking its head between the two seats and coughing violently on the side of me face. Sick. Then I noticed that the dude next to me was acting very suspicious with the plastic bottle he was holding... he kept looking inside it and kept it in a horizontal position the whole time... then I noticed that it had been cut in half and sewn back together... what the hell?It was some time before I figured out that he was smuggling a bird in a water bottle. The poor thing was tweaking out. He eventually went to go sit behind me but then had a violent phlemy coughing fit all the way to samui. Yuck. Caught the ferry on time and managed to make it back to the Island with plenty of time to spare.