ten ₱esos

disservice from Banana Travel and Tours and Banana Cafe:

I had to depart Malaysia by May 30, so I thought that I’d ride a bus or train north to Thailand.  Rather than ride a slow, narrow-gauge  train 19 hours to Bangkok, which may have been an interesting trip, then wander in Bangkok making tourist photos, then come 19 hours back, I opted for an easier solution: a Toyota van ride from New China Penang to the Malaysia/Thailand border just to exit then later reenter Malaysia.

I advise that you don’t use Banana Travel & Tours, on the south side of Chulia Street, in George Town.  I had told one of its travel agents that I wanted to make a ‘visa run’ to Thailand, and he sold to me a ticket to ride to Hot Yai, which I thought was on the border.  I’d read two mentions of it on the internet as a nondescript south Thailand town that’s near Malaysia.  Very-small-scale maps show Hot Yai near the border.  I was told that that I’d have a four-hour van ride each direction for my visa run, 8:30-12:30, and a return trip from 3:30-7:30.  So eleven hours of my day would be spent.  I’d thought that the Thailand border was much closer to Penang than a four-hour drive!  I asked if anything in Hot Yai is worth seeing or photographing.  No answer.  I figured I’d have an authentic Thai lunch and walk about to make a few photos in the three-hour layover.

Well, I went from home to Chulia Street earlier than necessary this morning, because I assumed that I could eat breakfast in one of the hostels or cafes, such as Banana Guest House/Bar/Cafe before the 8:30 van departure.  Well, although menus were on all the tables in Banana Cafe, an attendant told me that I could only have coffee and toast before 8:00.  I don’t drink coffee, and I wanted more than toast.

I walked to Stardust.  It was closed.  Jim’s Place was closed.  Almost every cafe in sight was closed, and I realized that they stay open late to serve booze to tourists and are thus closed at this hour.  I entered a narrow cafe that Dominic and I had gone to in early February.  It only serves tea, coffee, toast, fruit juice, and Milo …  So I had an unnecessarily long wait for tea with milk and toast with butter and jelly that had been cut into small squares.  I paid then walked back to Banana hoping to eat real food.  The waiter/janitor/security guard (who knows?) wouldn’t even look at me, so although 8:00 had passed and the cook may have come to work, I wasn’t allowed to order a meal.  Oh, well …

The ’8:30 van’ didn’t arrive until 8:48.  After two guys and I boarded it, it rolled down the street only as far as Swiss Hotel, where Indonesians boarded the Toyota.  Rather than proceed to the George Town ferry terminal to take the shortest path to Butterworth on the mainland, then zoom north toward Thailand, the van driver slowly drove miles south through thick morning traffic to Penang Bridge, then over it, then north for a while, then on a circuitous route of surface streets.  Behind a deserted shopping mall the van stopped to get one more passenger and his luggage.

The van slowly zig-zagged from the shopping mall to a highway on which we picked up speed for a few minutes until the driver decided to stop for several minutes to buy gasoline or diesel fuel.  I wondered why he hadn’t fueled the van before 8:30 or 8:48.

Eventually we were at a respectable cruising speed.  Two hours after departing Swiss Hotel we stopped at a highway rest stop/food court for twenty-three minutes.  I had been told that my trip to Hot Yai would last four hours, so I thought that we’d stopped halfway to my destination.  Well, soon after we had resumed traveling north, I was surprised to see that we’d reached the “Imigresen” checkpoint to depart Malaysia!  The driver parked beside a curb, we disembarked the van and walked to the small booths to present our passports and departure cards to get permission to leave the country.

When we’d done that, we rode the van a few minutes north to the Thailand border.  We stepped out and walked to brown booths under one corner of a huge steel canopy to present our passports, arrival cards and visa requests to the Thais.  Afterward, the van driver escorted me to a seating area diagonally across the border plaza — under the opposite corner of  the shade/rain canopy, where I’d present myself at one of the three booths in the afternoon in order to leave Thailand.  The driver told me to be there, at the gang seating, at 3:30, the time indicated on my ticket for the return trip from Hot Yai to George Town.

This place on the border didn’t seem to be much of a border town.  Many heavy trucks slowly crept south in a queue on the broken road approaching Malaysia.  A few luxury cars and mini-motorbikes, bearing black Malay number plates, passed the trucks on the left, the faster lanes through the Thailand exit.  Fruit vendors crowded the periphery of the checkpoint plaza.

Aside from several 7-11 stores, a few go-go-girls parlors and several modern hotels within a kilometer of the border checkpoint plaza, the rest of the place was decrepit.  Broken roads, run-down stores and houses, vendors’ pushcarts, tourist souvenir stalls …

As I walked and walked for hours, looking for photo opportunities and a decent restaurant in which to enjoy a Thai lunch, I saw no school, no church, no temple, no mosque, no city hall, no clinic, no hospital, no ‘Hot Yai’ town signs in English, and I tried to reconcile this ‘empty,’ run-down non-town with the brief descriptions of Hot Yai that I’d read on the internet a week earlier.  I didn’t know that I wasn’t in Hot Yai, the destination that I’d paid to go to, the destination on the ticket that the driver looked at twice.

At 3:30 the driver didn’t meet me at the ‘waiting area’ near the Thailand exit booths, and I saw no van. I waited … I bought a coconut to drink from one of the nearby fruit vendors, and her wristwatch read 2:54.  I ascertained that Thailand time is an hour behind Malaysia time.

So I drank from the coconut, walked a few hundred meters, bought sesame/peanut brittle and looked for more people or foods to photograph just to kill time.  But there was really nothing more to do or see. I had been there for four hours.  I returned to the border plaza around 3:15 to await the driver at the cement benches that he’d pointed to.

At 3:30 Thailand time –4:30 Malaysia time — the driver didn’t appear.  I waited and waited and waited, becoming irked. Eventually – at 4:40 Thailand time –5:40 Malaysia time — a different Toyota van approached the border.  When it had stopped to disgorge its passengers so that they could walk to the booths to get ‘exit stamps’ in their passports, I showed my Banana Travel ticket to the driver and asked if he drove for Banana Travel.  He nodded and gestured to the van interior, indicating that I could ride.  I waited for the other passengers to return to the van so that they could retake their seats.  I asked the driver why I had no ride at 3:30.  He said, “No English.”

When the other passengers had returned to the van, I asked if this van, coming south from who-knows-where, was late.  No one could say whether it was late.  I asked if it had had a mechanical breakdown or if it had to make a long detour off a highway.  No one had anything to say.  So I continued to wonder why I hadn’t met any driver or van between 3:15 and 4:40.

After southward travel on a highway, rather than taking a car ferry from Butterworth 3km across the channel to George Town then drive 2km to Banana Travel and Tours, the driver wasted about an hour of our evening.  What an idiot!

He took us south of the ferry terminal, to Penang Bridge and over it, then drove further south, away from Banana Travel in George Town, to a bus depot, dropped off a passenger who paid cash, then insisted that the two Malay women who’d boarded the van south of the border, pay him RM 30 each.  Then he drove several miles through evening traffic to Air Itam, turning left and right, right and left as one of the women directed, until we arrived at a home where they disembarked.

After chugging through stop-and-go traffic for another twenty minutes, we arrived at Banana Guest House, where two passengers entered with luggage.  I was surprised that the travel agency was still open.

I walked in and asked why I hadn’t been taken to Hot Yai, where I’d paid to go, and why a driver, whom I never saw again, told me to wait at the border at 3:30 though no van arrived until 4:40.  I got no sensible answer, so I advise that no one patronize Banana Travel and Tours.