Homeless in Thailand

29th July After another early 6am start, we were picked up by minibuses to take us to the main bus station in Bangkok, which looked more like an airport rather than a bus station. Food managers, Susie and Beth, bought us all croissants and biscuits the night before so we all tucked into these on the bus. We then all piled on the main bus to take us to Mae Sot which was meant to take us around 8 hours. Some people read their books whilst others tried to sleep most of the way. The bus stopped a few times for us to buy snacks and go to the loo so instead of having lunch, most of us just snacked all the way on cereal and biscuits. Cliff got a phone call from Sawang, our in country agent, telling us that it was unsafe for us to go to Mae Sot as our accommodation was completely flooded. He told us to get off at Tak, 80km before we would reach Mae Sot. The bus driver dropped us all off at the bus station in Tak, leaving us stranded with no accommodation for the next 3 hours. Trying to ask the local people where any guesthouses were was an impossible task. Some people stayed lying on top of all our bags whilst small parties went out to search for places to stay. Miss Wentworth spoke to a local woman who owned a hotel. They wanted our business so they gave us quite a discount, although it was still quite over budget. At this point we didn’t have many choices of places to stay and we didn’t want to have to camp in the bus station so decided to go with the hotel. The hotel picked us all up in a truck. One truck had all of us in and the other had all of our bags. When we arrived at the hotel spirits rised as this hotel seemed amazing compared to the last place we stayed at. Once we had all had showers and seen our rooms, we met in the lobby and the hotel manager took us all out to a restaurant. We had different traditional dishes which we shared between all of us. These included rice, a spicy chicken curry and some sort of pork soup with seaweed. We then all had banana pancakes afterwards which we all thought were amazing! (Ed.Often a crisis turns in our favour....'Fortune follows the brave...' Maddie Barr