Police cops.

Just a quick update. I got off the night bus not certain as to whether I slept at all.

A guy with a car was there and offered to take me to the border to Thailand for 60 ringgit. This seemed steep, but turned out to be a good deal. The drive was over an hour through the mountains. We screeched around the corners.

I walked across the border and the plethora of empty minibuses desperate for passengers that I was promised were distinctly absent. With not much else to do I started walking. At the bottom of the hill there was a police checkpoint so I asked the policeman how to get to Satun, which is the nearest town. At that moment his buddy arrived in an unmarked police car. The policeman called his wife, who spoke English, and she said it costs 600 baht. I assumed she meant for the taxi they were going to call, but they meant for them to take me.

I agreed, but first we had to have breakfast. The 3 policemen shared their brekky with me - cakes and coffee - and made jokes about how I'm too big to arrest.

I set off with one of the policemen and as he didn't speak English we had to communicate in the international language of football. That's how I learned that he was a "yeah blud, you hear me fam" arsenal supporter (if you don't understand the reference look up arsenal fans on youtube). We said player names and did thumbs up or thumbs down.

He called his wife again and she explained that I needed to wait for a lotus express bus. I repeated this back to her and she kept saying it's wrong. After a while I realised that we were parked outside a tescos express, which they call lotus express. I could catch any bus from there.

Since I've been writing this the bus arrived and I'm now on my way to Trang. It is 100 baht... Much cheaper than the 600 the po po charged but then again, the bus has to go the speed limit.

I'm going to try to get to Koh Lanta from Trang today.

The photo is me with the policeman having breakfast.