The day started early, and with an expensive breakfast of bread and jam from our hotel. At least this hotel was able to manage a breakfast quickly. Our bus was meant to leave at 8.15am, and we'd arranged a pick up at our hotel at 7.30am. The pick up came at 7.45am, and it was a minibus which whisked us away to a larger bus. The larger bus started doing the rounds of local hotels to pick up more passengers. Eventually we made it to Sihanoukville bus station, 6km out of the centre of town. We were there until 10am. We finally got underway to the border, after the bus company had crammed as many passengers as possible into the bus. This included people sitting on plastic stools in the aisle.

We reached the border at Koh Kong/ Hat Lek at some time around 2pm. We were sat at the back of the bus, and had to wait for everyone to get off before we could grab our big bags. This done, we hurried off to the Cambodian immigration for our 'out’ stamp, plus fingerprints and photographs were taken. Luckily, we didn’t have to wait for long, and we were able to queue under shelter from the baking hot sun. We walked across the border and into Thailand immigration, filled out a form, went to the window and were stamped into Thailand, no problems.

After finding a pay-for toilet, we made our way to the bus company’s signage, where we were given a small green sticker to wear, to show that we had onward travel to Bangkok. We were wary of this, as without our ticket we couldn’t prove that we had onward travel booked, for our next change of bus. We were assured that it would be fine, and a chap behind us confirmed that he’d done it before with no problems. We were instructed not to lose the sticker. We photographed our tickets anyway, feeling paranoid that the bus company were out to stitch us out of as many pennies as possible.

After this, we were told to wait in a nearby side-of-the-road store for "20 minutes", whilst everyone else from the bus cleared immigration as well. We were pushed around a bit by the staff, so opted not to give them any money by purchasing their goods. We sat, and waited, until our next minibus turned up and we were able to board, at 3.10pm.

This minibus was only taking us as far as a town called Trat, where we were assured our stickers would get us the rest of the way to Bangkok. We were told the minibus would take an hour to reach Trat – it took an hour and a half. When we arrived, all 11 of us were ushered into one car with a trailer on the back. We weren’t told why, we were just sighed at and repeatedly told “5 minutes!”  Five minutes to what? It was fifteen minutes to reach an office, where we were told to sit and wait for a minibus, not the big bus we’d been promised, to go to Victory Monument, and not Khao San Road, as promised. We were told the bus would be three minutes. It was 50 minutes before it turned up, and it wasn’t big enough for all of us and our belongings. We were squeezed in. Jayna was given half a seat and when the man asked if it was okay and she said no, there was some grumbling and pointless rearranging of bags. In the end, the man tried to put her seatbelt on her until Jayna told him to stop, then he slammed the door shut and the minibus was finally underway.

We did some of our own rearranging on the bus, moving bags around to try to clear some space. We ended up stopping in a fuel station and were all told to get off the minibus, which helped with the rearranging efforts. The problem was the amount of space was too small, no matter which way we tried it. Uncomfortable, annoyed, hungry, and p*ssed off at being lied to constantly, we were underway again. The journey to Bangkok from Trat took five hours in the end. Our driver spent the whole time coughing, snorting, sneezing, hocking his guts up. It wasn't a pleasant ride.

We’d booked a hotel near Khao San Road for two reasons: 1) we were told the bus stopped there; 2) we knew there were vegetarian restaurants near there. As the bus didn’t stop in Khao San Road, and we arrived too late for eating at the vegetarian restaurants, this made the whole thing pointless.

After arriving at Victory Monument, we flagged down a taxi, only to find that the driver refused to put the meter on. We sent him on his way. Four taxis later, all of the drivers were refusing to put their meters on. We eventually and reluctantly climbed into one, and paid the requested fare, to get to our hotel. We reached Khao San Road's hectic spill over into the neighbouring road, found our hotel in the midst of the shut vegetarian restaurants, and checked in. We finally got to our room at 11.30pm. With a bus booked to take us to the airport at 6am, we weren't very happy at the prospect of little sleep after such a long day of travel. Plus we were really hungry, not having eaten anything of substance since 7am.

Grumbling, we went to sleep, and tried to make the best of the situation.

Next stop - Koh Phangan!