Hatyai, Thailand

The need to get up before 5am whilst on holiday is usually due to the need to relocate to a new destination. In our case we were leaving Taiping by 9 seater van and driving across the Thai border to the shopping town of Hatyai.

Our driver / guide was a local and by nature turned on the air-conditioning to full as soon as he got into the car. This would have been ok if the van had spent all day baking in tropical heat. However in the early morning, we required additional blankets to the amusement of Mei's relatives who commented "how are you both going to survive London?".

Crossing the Thai Border
The drive from Taiping to Hatyai took about 5 hours, a fair proportion was spent asleep until we reached a roadside stop where money could be exchanged from Malaysian Ringgit to Thai Baht and our passports were stamped by a travel agent. The border crossing was nearby and we disembarked the van to walk u to the checkpoints to get our passports stamps. The DMZ zone between Malaysia and Thailand consisted of a deep trench and a duty free store.

Hatyai
Once we passed the Thai border, the scenery changed from shop signs in Malay to Thai script and many photos of the royal family. Our hotel was in the downtown area and we noticed a strong police presence at every corner. This was due to the arrival of Thai New Year - traditionally celebrated by one big water fight that would kick off the following week.

We settled into our new surroundings by doing the two things that we knew best - eating and shopping. Our recommendation for fellow tourists in South East Asia is to bring along a calculator (phone one does fine) in order to play bargaining wars with the market vendors - remember always start off with about 10% of the advertised price (or initial price when items do not carry tags) and work your way up. They can always smell a tourist and add a fat margin to the price. But in the interest of not being yelled at by the shop-keeper, only start bargaining if you really have an interest in buying.

One of the benefits of shopping within a border town like Hatyai is that they often accept a wide range of currencies. When it came to spending all our Thai currency on the last day, we found out after one dress purchase that we were a frustrating 30 Baht short for another piece of clothing. After a short negotiation session (she wasn't keen on offering a 30 Baht discount), we ended up with an agreed position of paying in Baht with a top-up of Malaysian Ringgit.

Log Terrace Restaurant
Our eating cultural experience kicked off at the Log Terrace Restaurant, a specialist in seafood dishes and the interior decor had been designed to look like a tropical jungle emerging from a multi-storey concrete apartment block.

Log Terrace Restaurant

Taking the term 'urban jungle' literally

Its a jungle out there

Hello there turtle

Catfish on the menu

Crossing the Malaysian Border

From Hatyai the plan was to say goodbye to Mei's relatives and head out west to Kuala Perlis to catch a ferry to the resort island of Langkawi. We said our farewells at the Malaysian side of the border before hopping into a local taxi.

However, the taxi had driven no more than 10 meters before it was flagged down a side lane by a van full of military border police. Both of us were quite anxious when they opened the taxi door and started chatting to the taxi driver. At this stage we didn't have any indication if the taxi driver could speak any English and on face value it appeared we had done a dodgy border run with visas stamped 24 hours apart.

So when the uniformed soldier demanded to see our passports, we tried to explain that we were tourists heading for Langkawi. Luckily he did understand some broken English, we advised them we were Australian (which resulted in him giving us a puzzled look given our ethnic appearance is Chinese and Filipino) but after consulting his colleagues he decided to leave us alone (much to our relief) and we were on our way to the tropical island of Langkawi.

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