A Night in Chumphon, Thailand

A transit point and crossroads for travelers, no one lingers in Chumphon. Taxis will take you to the ocean docks where there are ferries to popular islands. The train, which runs up and down Thailand's east coast, dumps people in Chumphon but the train station is nowhere near the bus station. The bus station is miles out from the center of town. Bus is the only way to get to the west side of Thailand due to rather large hills down the middle of the isthmus. We, too, were going to Chumphon only in order to get a bus west to Ranong.

Some tourists we'd met days before recommended the Suda Guest House. I wrote it down in my little notebook. Trip Advisor didn't know anything about Suda Guest House in Chumphon. I should have taken that as some sort of sign but we really liked the people who had recommended Suda and we figured it would be fine. Lonely Planet had this to say; "Suda, the friendly English-speaking owner, maintains her impeccable standards with six rooms, all with wooden floors and a few nice touches that you wouldn't expect for the price."

Not in the mood to look around for hotels or guest houses as we have done dozens of times when entering an unfamiliar city, we went directly to Suda Guest House. Right away I thought there was something strange about the woman who owned it but I was more in the mood of overlooking problems. She showed us to room No. 2000. I pointed at the number above the door and said, "Big number!" She said, "Big room!"

Well, the size was about all the room had going for it. There were no windows but the back wall was solid sliding glass doors to a completely fenced-in outdoor porch with some dying plants in pots. The chain link fencing was on the top of the porch as well as the sides. At first glance the porch area seemed like a plus but after looking at it for a few minutes it felt more like the fun area of a prison cell. The chain link porch abutted the surrounding towering buildings which meant there was no view at all. The walls were inches away on all sides. There was no escape, no view and no sunlight. I suppose a person could raise birds there and become the bird man of Suda. But we were not going to be held prisoner there and more important was what the rest of the room was like.

It was simply a big room with a rock-hard bed. Nothing was on the walls and there was no bathroom. It was out in the hall. There was nearly no furniture in the room and certainly no TV. Lonely Planet had lied because there was no wood floor in the room either. It was overpriced by quite a bit too but we took it anyway because we didn't want to spend time looking around town for something else in the late afternoon. The owner said we could put our bikes in a building a block away. She led us to a barn-like structure and she locked our bikes inside. We felt they were safe but they would be the farthest away from us we had ever had them the entire trip. We didn't really have ready access to them but, no matter, we were tired and didn't need them until morning.

When we paid and got settled in the room we discovered there were no bottles of water which is normally the welcoming custom. There were no towels either. No soap. No shampoo. I was starting to wonder what all the "nice touches" were. There was no air conditioning either.

Andrea went downstairs to get the wifi password and came back saying that the woman was so weird she wouldn't tell Andrea the password. She had to type in the password herself on Andrea's iPad. That had never happened before! Did she think we were going to sell it on the street? Since Andrea didn't know the password I had to go downstairs to have the woman type it on my laptop as well. She was really starting to irritate us.

Andrea read on some forum about a guy who had asked for a towel at Suda and got in a big fight with the woman. And he never got a towel.

We didn't dare ask for towels.

When we took showers we could get only cold water. We didn't dare complain though. We just figured we had somehow landed in Suda Jail and we better toe the line. All we wanted was to see our bicycles again.

We went downstairs to talk to the woman about the location of bus stations, night markets and restaurants. She referenced all points from the road we came in on however we hadn't come in on that road. She insisted we had even though we told her several times which road we had come into Chumphon on. She ignored us each time and continued to act as though we came in on a different road. I was starting to think she was either nuts or had some defiant disorder. Actually, more likely, she was a major control freak. And where were all the nice touches that Lonely Planet had mentioned? No this, no that and an irritating personality we had to deal with. I couldn't find any nice touches. We didn't even dare ask her for bottled water which almost always comes with a room. She was so weird she was starting to give me the creeps!

In the night there were hundreds of tiny mosquitoes that ate us up. They were so tiny that we couldn't even see them. I never did see one! But I had major itching bites all over and I know they had flown in and were not bedbugs. Upon closer inspection in the morning I saw big gaps in the tracks of the sliding glass doors. If we had known we were going to be eaten alive by microscopic mosquitoes we could have pitched our tent in the room. The room was big enough. But those mosquitoes were so small that possibly they could have maneuvered their way through the no-seeum netting. I don't know. All we really knew was that we got no sleep and we decided spur of the moment to leave. One night was enough. No need for another night. We had had enough of the control freak's nice touches.

NO hot water -NO drinking water - NO hot water - NO soap - NO shampoo - NO towels - NO windows - NO password - NO bathroom in the room - NO wood floors - NO TV - NO mosquito net - No mention of mosquitoes - NO nearby bikes - No personality - NO cheap- NO sleep. NO SUDA!

That's just the way it is sometimes. It's not really a big deal. We moved on. It's just funny how odd some people can be and we have to just laugh about it. Or, write about it as a warning to others.

lovebruce