The other thing about our homestay is that it’s some 45 minutes drive away from the famous Samila beach. This was totally my fault because when I was searching for a place to stay on Airbnb, I just moved the cursor further away from Samila beach until I found the cheapest one. I had no idea it was 20 kilometres away from there and we need to take a ferry across for 20 baht per car.
Thankfully, Samila beach is so much cleaner from Muang Ngam, maybe because it’s a popular tourist attraction so there’s more initiative to keep the place clean. We definitely should have stayed near there but the hotel price was prohibitive. First thing on the agenda was brunch. We had brunch at Bung Sem muslim food restaurant with a nice beach view. The sea food was okay, we had some fish, beef, fried chicken and calamari rings but we were totally ripped off for nearly 200 ringgit afterwards. 90 ringgit for some calamari rings? Definitely don’t go there.
After that the kids went on some horse ride along the beach. The standard price is 150 baht per head. We also had some coconut ice cream and took some pictures with the resident mermaid (statue). We didn’t stop by anywhere else after Samila. There’s still a four hours drive to the Rantau Panjang ICQ and we didn’t want to miss the 10pm crossing deadline. You can still cross after 10 but there will be extra charges.
For the 300 kilometres drive, we finally used up all our sweet subsidized Malaysian petrol and had to fill up with some expensive unsubsidized Thai petrol. I fill up just enough petrol at a PTT station to reach Kelantan. We tried some coffee at the Amazon coffee outlet there and much to our dismay, the latte was sweet. They literally put some sweetened milk in the coffee. Who does that? Remember that next time you buy coffee at Amazon cafe.
We drove along Pattani and Narathiwat to get to Kelantan. The drive was quiet and uneventful. We didn’t stop by any of those towns to save time. Along the way we encountered many unattended road blocks on the road. Not surprising since there is an ongoing political unrest in southern Thailand. It’s a long history and you need to go back to the The Anglo-Siam Treaty of 1909 to find out why.
We arrived at the Kelantan border around 8pm. There’s some queue at the immigration checkpoint and we need to pay 25 baht for the “car import” charge which need to be done by the car owner. Remember to hand over the papers that you received earlier during entry. The rest of the passengers need to queue inside the immigration office to have our passport checked. After that the crossing into Malaysia went on smoothly.
That concludes our first visit to Thailand over land. It’s a short but memorable visit. Things in that part of Thailand are not always cheap but the food are generally quite good (except at Bung Sem). It’s little wonder that Hat Yai and Songkhla transformed into a mini Malaysia during weekends and holiday season. It’s nearby and there’s a lot of shops to visit, good food to try and cheap hotels to stay at. It sounded intimidating to drive into Thailand for the first time but if you got all your papers ready, it should be a breeze.
