Transport info BKK to Pats
[url]http://www.pattayaconcierge.com/information/transportation-to-pattaya.php[/url]
That toilet may have very well saved your life
[QUOTE=Jgm005;1385704]Very good advice. I am sure we all can recite our own examples of taxi drivers falling a sleep. Last month when I took a car from Suk / Soi 19 to Pattaya (1000bt) I was on full alert. One can tell when one sees the driver, open the window, turns the radio up, squirms in the drivers seat. In this case I told him I needed a toilet stop. Really did not need same but wanted this guy to collect his wits.[/QUOTE]
(My first post of this story got screwed up somehow. Here is a more coherent re-post. Apologies for the clutter)
Calling a timeout to stop at a toilet with the intention of keeping the driver awake was a good move.
When traveling from Bangkok to Pattaya I've never used the mini-buses or the "Monger Express" from Ekami but I have taken both buses and mini-buses from Pattaya to other parts of the country. Last summer I made a decision to follow my "Simon II Bar Beer Complex" bar girl back home to Issan for some meeting, greeting, and bug eating inter-mixed with consuming mystery meat from the local market and bottles of gut-rot Lao Khao with her extended family in Surin. We took a bus leaving close to midnight from Pattaya for the 10 hour ride to Prasat. Can't really say too many negatives about the bus. It was clean, efficient, and on time. A few scheduled stops along the way to pick up additional passengers in other cities and for toilet and snacks but each stop was timed and were no more than 15 minutes it felt. The company switched drivers at a scheduled stop about halfway through the trip at about 3:30am. The worst part of the trip was a DVD of some hour long Thai Talk show involving some fat Thai lady whining and screaming at the top of her uvula at all of the males on the show. The volume was loud and the show was repeatedly looped for about 4 hours. The driving was rapid per the usual in Thailand but my spider-sense didn't tingle too often, but then again wrecking the bus would have at least stopped that damn talk show.
My actual stay in Issan was a trip of a trip for sure. I know many of you have made this journey into the Heart of Darkness so I won't go into that here but at some point a decision was made to not take the bus but to take a mini-bus back to Pattaya. So at 10pm the mini-bus (which is just really a larger mini-van) teeters and totters up to the front of her family shack on 3 full wheels and 1 wheel that looked like it belonged on a Hotwheel. Her uncles convened on the issue in their Cambodian dialect. Her dad wound up taking one of the wheels off of his carbon dated truck (the only wheel that fossil had by the way) and selling it to the mini-bus driver. Her dad kept the Hotwheel to go tubing with later (who knows). While the wheels were being switched one of the uncles offered the mini-bus driver a couple of shots of Lao Khao. He declined and stated that he had his own and proceeded to pull out a mostly empty bottle of that 1000 proof stuff from under his dashboard for a few upturns. My only thoughts to that were to look up at the sky and say to myself "My Father, who art in Heaven. Hollow be thy name. Thy Kingdom come." Was interrupted from finishing my sinners last resort to heaven by my bar girl leaping into the mini-bus for the trip.
The seats were large but still managed to be stiff and uncomfortable at the same time. The schedule was quite unpredictable in that the driver had to pick up 2 others who were not exactly on the way. This was a negative compared to the bus which had predictable scheduled stops. Anyway, we ended up picking up a girl of about 18 as one of the pickups. She sobbed as loudly as she did uncontrollably in the the last row for what seemed like hours. My bar girl comforted her for a bit and later explained to me that she was leaving Issan and her family for the first time to go work in Pattaya. I would spend just about the rest of the trip trying to devise a way to figure out what bar she was destined for and slip her 300 baht for a down payment on a bar fine first thing when we got back to Pattaya. I was not successful. Guess I'm just more of a scoundrel than I am clever. We also picked up another guy who wound up sitting in the front passenger seat.
The drive was cool until the driver started winking at about 1am. That winking soon turned to nodding. The nodding turned to almost swerving the vehicle on to the shoulder into a bank of trees. I saw the distress of the driver and I leaned forward to sternly express to him my concern but my girl held me back citing face for the driver as the reason. Shouldn't criticize. During the next hour we hit about 3 police check points. Me being Farang, it was my first time being grateful to run into these here as each check point woke the driver up. Though I was afraid that I may lose that 300 baht that I had curled up in my hand in my pocket, that was destined for my future short time with missy there in the backseat, to a bribe to the boys in tight brown who were now flashing a light in my face through the window of the mini-bus. No bribe was requested. Soon after the last check point the driver was nodding again. I leaned forward again but with a different tactic in mind. In my broken Thai I asked him if he was a Manchester United fan. Me being American, and African-American at that, I don't know the slightest about non-American futbol but I figured all other males across this planet would. He perked up and we talked futbol for a while keeping him awake. My girl translated as the conversation got deeper. When that dog stopped hunting I started complimenting the King which brought another smile to his face as it does a lot of Thais in my limited experience. I was ready to keep this guy awake thereby keeping myself alive. Girl in the back is sobbing again. Now where is my 300 baht?
We stopped at a rest stop. I continued my face-saving for him tactic of smiling and talking to him as opposed to harshly criticizing his transporting passengers on a Hotwheel while drinking Lao Khao and drowsy. I offered him a coffee for this reason. My girl said he didn't drink coffee but he accepted anyway in order to save face for me from his perspective by not rejecting me. Trying to do things the local way to get out of this one. I kept him up with coffee and conversation. We ended up dropping dude in the passenger seat off in a town waaaaay off from Pattatya so the trip took an extra 2 hours. The Issan Princess in the back got off at Beach Road minus my indecent proposal. We eventually made it back to Tim Boutique Hotel just off of 2nd Road and Soi 12, just behind Nid Bar 2005. My girl left on her motorbike that she had kept parked at the hotel garage. She didn't have a helmet as the parking attendant had let his friend use her helmet because he didn't think she was coming back so soon. Thailand right?
I wound up using that $300 baht on a short time at "Up To You" Bar on Soi 6 less than 10 minutes later.
I had lived to hobby another day in the one and true Sin City.
