After leaving Kanchanaburi (for the second time) we shared a train carriage with some cockerels and monks to Bangkok Noi station, took a boatbus down the Chao Phraya River to central pier, then the Skytrain across town to Chatuchak to visit the famous weekend market. Chatuchak Weekend Market has over six thousand stalls and it was extremely interesting. It was not, however, very relaxing. There was a whole section devoted to fighting cockerels and another devoted to large wooden penises. The heat was unbearable and there were too many people and the tiny grubby alleys between the stalls were not wide enough to stop in without blocking them.

In Bangkok we used flushing toilets for the first time in two weeks. Recently we have been using the scoop and slosh variety. There is something satisfyingly feral about using squat toilets. Flushing toilets now seem unnecessarily bulky and waste a lot of water. Toilet paper rarely features in Asian bathrooms either - instead we use a miniature jetwash attached to a short length of hose. Again there is less cost and less waste, and you come out the bathroom cleaner than you would if you'd used paper. And we think we live in a more developed country?

I liked Bangkok. It is very large, very dirty, very stinky and very noisy. The traffic is appalling. Driving in London is nothing compared to driving in Bangkok. There are no road rules except that the biggest vehicle always has right of way. Red traffic lights and Give Way signs are always ignored. The pollution is so bad that the streets are constantly filled with a horrible dark haze. Because of it, the traffic policemen (a very smart but essentially impotent lot who do nothing but blow annoying whistles all day), motorcyclists and tuk-tuk drivers have to wear surgical facemasks. Just the sheer number of two-stroke motorbikes is incredible. There are hundreds of thousands of them. Helmets are compulsory on main thoroughfares but this is clearly an unpopular rule because everyone deliberately leaves them unfastened (including the police) or just balances them on top of their heads, then takes them off as soon as they turn down a side street.

Our day of sightseeing began in Bangkok's Chinatown district. We visited the "Golden Buddha" at a temple called Wat Traimat. This sixteen-feet-high, twelve-feet-wide statue is made of solid pure gold and weighs five and a half tons. It was made in Sukhothai (Thailand's first capital city) in the 1300's and was encased in plaster to hide it from invaders. Somehow they forgot what they had done. Much later the plaster Buddha was moved to Bangkok and installed in a temple but it was not until 1955 when some of the plaster fell off that everyone realised what was underneath. The discovery launched a country-wide craze for tapping away at plaster Buddhas.

We wandered aimlessly for an hour through Chinatown's narrow sidestreets; colourful and atmospheric alleys lined with shops selling things like spices, rice, fruit and cloth. Then we took the boatbus to Wat Po temple to see the "Reclining Buddha" statue. As we walked towards the entrance we were accosted by a tuk-tuk driver:

TT Driver: "Hello. Where you going?"
clop: "Hello. The Reclining Buddha."
TT Driver: "Ahh. Is down there but is closed today."
clop: "Closed? Why?"
TT Driver: "Today is special day. Reclining Buddha closed. No tourists allowed. You visit Grand Palace instead. I have tuk-tuk. You want tuk-tuk to Grand Palace?"
clop, smelling a rat: "Actually I think I'll go and see if the Reclining Buddha is open."
TT Driver: "No, no. Is closed today. No tourists. Is special day."
clop: "Well I'm going to look for myself."

And of course it was open, as it apparently is every day of the year.

The (indoor) Reclining Buddha statue is made of plaster-covered brick and entirely gilded in gold leaves. It is ridiculously big. It is one hundred and fifty feet long and forty nine feet high. Buddha's smile is seventeen feet wide! It was so big it was funny. The soles of his vast, seventeen-feet-long feet are beautifully inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

After leaving the temple we walked back to the tuk-tuk driver.

TT Driver: "Is open?"
clop: "Of course it's open. You know it's open. It's open every day."
TT Driver: "Really? Someone told me is closed today."
clop: "No they didn't. You're a liar. Why did you say it was closed?"
TT Driver: "No. Someone told me."
clop, raising his voice: "No they didn't. You know it's open. The man in there says you stand out here every day and tell people it's closed. He says you're a liar. Why did you tell me it's closed?"
TT Driver looks flustered and moves behind a food stall. A group of people are listening.
clop: "You're a liar. You shouldn't do that. It's bad. You're a liar."
TT Liar, shrugging: "I'm a liar."

I could have wrung his stupid lying neck.

We walked up past the Grand Palace and had a look at Khao San Road, Bangkok's main backpacker area and a bit of a culture shock, before walking to Hualam Phong and getting a taxi back to our hostel. And yes, we had to ask to get the meter turned on.

The next morning we took a taxi to the new Northern and Northeastern Bus Terminal at Mo Chit II. It was massive. I have never seen so many buses together in one place. There were more than six hundred departure bays. It took us a while to find the right ticket desk (as everything was written in Thai script) before we could buy our tickets to Sukhothai. The only bus departing in the next couple of hours was a first class air-conditioned one so, what a pity, we were forced to travel in comfort for the next seven and a half hours (cost: 3.80ukp). Our tickets came with "Food and Beverage Coupons" attached to them but, as there was no other English written anywhere on the tickets or the coupons, we had no idea what to do with them. It all became clear when we pulled in at a remote bus station during the afternoon and everyone lined up in front of a serving hatch. We were given a plate of Pad Kra-Prao Kai (an extremely yummy Thai dish of chicken fried with chopped beans, basil leaves and chillies) with rice. It was incredibly spicy, almost too spicy for me to eat, but it wasn't hot enough for the Thai people. They poured bowls of chilli oil over theirs before eating it!

Arriving at New Sukhothai bus station at 6pm we were mobbed by the usual gang of lying taxi drivers and accommodation touts. For once we'd rung ahead and booked a room but none of the touts were from our guesthouse. The taxi driver told us it was a 4km walk to the guesthouse; he said he'd take us there for thirty baht. Sadly, we no longer trust anything taxi or tuk-tuk drivers tell us. We said, "Sorry but we're walking," and asked, "Which is the best way?" The taxi driver produced a map and showed us the route. He said, "It's four kilometres. It's a long way. I'm only trying to help. Come in taxi?" We replied, "No thanks. Thank you. Bye." He shouted after us, "I'm only trying to help!" We set off walking down a very long road and were starting to wish we'd taken the taxi after all when a lad pulled over and offered us a lift for ten baht. His "taxi" was a jumbo, a type of samlor consisting of the back end of a moped with a square cage attached to the front, in which we sat. It was a fun ride despite the worry that the driver couldn't really see where he was going. When we arrived we discovered that the guesthouse was actually about three hundred metres from the bus station - there was a path straight across the field to it. Yet again we had been lied to by Thai people trying to cheat us.

Our room in New Sukhothai was a wooden hut on wooden stilts in a bog. The door, walls, roof and window shutters were made of woven bamboo strips. There was no glass in the windows. The scoop and slosh toilet was unenclosed inside the hut. The shower and sink drained through a pipe into the bog. The bed had a straw mattress. clip had an extremely painful accident with her razor. At night rats and geckos scrabbled around the walls. Strangely enough, clip loved it. She didn't love the pigs squealing and being shot in the next field though.

Sukhothai was the capital of the first Kingdom of Siam (now Thailand) in the 13th and 14th centuries. We caught a songthaew from New Sukhothai to Old Sukhothai and rented some bicycles for the day. We cycled around the ancient ruins of the old city to see the various temples and Buddha images, and visited the nearby museum. Our songthaew back to New Sukhothai stopped at a school and picked up some school children. I counted thirty four people in the songthaew. Bear in mind this is a standard ute with benches in the back. At the guesthouse in the evening we counted forty four geckos on the ceiling.

It is now forty days since we have had any hot water. This isn't such a bad thing as the temperature is still averaging 34C during the day and 30C at night.

I have received an email from the government of Western Australia.


Dear (clop),

Attached please find the acknowledgement letter for your complaint received by the Department on 27 October.

Your enquiry has been allocated to Mr Gary Boyd, (telephone 9282 0661, email gboyd@docep.wa.gov.au) who will contact you within the next 10 days. We would appreciate it if you would advise the officer of your contact telephone number(s) and postal address, if you have not already done so. Your reference number for this enquiry is 185/06216/2003. Please quote this number in any future telephone calls or letters.

Marian Foster
Divisional Support Officer
Motor Vehicle and Travel Industries
Department of Consumer and Employment Protection
Tel: (08) 9282 0629

And so the two and half hour train journey from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi cost 38p each, third class wooden seats all the way. On arrival we ignored the lying taxi drivers and walked the short distance to Apple's guesthouse, crossing a road in front of two elephants on the way. Apple's was a great place to stay and their Thai food was fantastic.

For those of you that have never heard of Kanchanaburi (like me) here's a bit of background: During World War II Japan invaded Burma, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. To facilitate the movement of supplies, the Japanese used 60000 Allied prisoners of war and 200000 Asian labourers to build a 415km railway line linking Burma and Thailand. The terrain was almost impenetrable and most of the work clearing the jungle, cutting 27m-deep cuttings, building 7m-high embankments and constructing wooden trestle bridges was done by hand. During the fifteen months it took to complete the "Death Railway" 16000 (27%) of the Allied POW's and 100000 (50%) of the Asian labourers died from malnutrition, mistreatment or disease. Kanchanaburi was one of the many POW camps along the railway; it is also the site of the Bridge Over the River Kwai, where the line crosses the River Kwai Yai before continuing north-west along the valleys towards Burma. Nowadays the Thailand part of the Death Railway operates only as far as Nam Tok, about 80km north-west of Kanchanaburi, after which the line has been dismantled and, in some places, flooded by a reservoir.

We rented some mountain bikes and spent a day cycling around Kanchanaburi. We visited the moving JEATH museum, set in a reconstruction of a POW camp hut, and learned about the building of the railway. We visited two war cemeteries, together containing the graves of 7000 of the Allied POW's. It would appear that the 100000 dead Asian labourers have been largely forgotten.

We crossed the Kwai via a road bridge and visited Wat Tham Khao Poon, a surprisingly large cave system stuffed full of shrines and religious objects, where we were given a guided tour by a six-year-old girl whose running commentary in Thai was wholly incomprehensible.

We cycled through the countryside up the west bank of the Kwai, with local people shouting hello to us from their gardens, and back over the famous railway bridge. There is no walkway so you actually have to walk or cycle between the rails. Luckily, a train didn't come along. It seemed a little weird to see so many Japanese tourists on the bridge, particularly as these were the only Japanese tourists we had seen in Asia, taking smiling group photos and flicking their fag ends into the river.

Back at Apple's we met Bruce, a Kiwi who has spent the last two and a half years working in the UK after a year long visit got a bit out of hand. He had stopped off in Thailand for a few days on his way back to Dunedin - his parents didn't know he was on his way home!

We also met David, a very interesting and animated history teacher from London who has been travelling through North and South America, New Zealand, Australia and Asia as part of a six month sabbatical.

A frog made itself at home in one of my boots. It lived there for the next three days. We found a big black scorpion outside our cabin. It was very aggressive. We saw a food-stall owner disembowelling a large frog.

We took a bus to Hellfire Pass, an 18m-deep cutting on part of the now-dismantled railway line, twelve miles from the Burmese border. We visited the memorial museum and walked 5km along the original route of the track to see the cuttings, embankments and trestle bridge sites (long since taken down). We took a bus to Nam Tok and then a train on the Death Railway back to Kanchanaburi. It was a very scenic journey. At Wang Po we crossed a 300m-long trestle bridge viaduct built into a cliff face, suspended over the River Kwai Noi. I'm surprised it's still open. The wooden struts are splitting or rotting or have bits missing from them, and there have been so many repairs that there's hardly room left for any more. As the passengers hung out of the windows and dangled out of the doorways the driver inched the train along the creaking cracking viaduct at walking pace, continuously scrutinising the line ahead and occasionally checking that the trailing carriages were still there. The train also crossed the Bridge Over the River Kwai.

And then it was time to return to Bangkok. We took the train back to Bangkok Noi station and bartered a tuk-tuk driver down to B100 for the journey east across the city to Sala Thai Mansion, our guesthouse near Lumphini and the various foreign embassies.

This is where clop turned into Mr Doilum. Mr Utter Thicky. At check-in I reached into my rucksack for the photocopy of my passport details for the guesthouse register. It wasn't there. In fact the entire plastic wallet containing our travellers' cheques, plane tickets, loose cash, passport photos, vaccination records and insurance documents wasn't there. Sudden panic. Where was it? Yes, I had left it hidden under the mattress in our room at Apple's in Kanchanaburi. Two frantic telephone calls later we were extraordinarily relieved to hear that it had been found intact and was now safely locked inside Apple's safety deposit filing cabinet. We would have to go back to collect it.

We picked our passports up from the Vietnam Embassy and took them to the Cambodian Embassy. It was shut. The next day we went back and it was open. The service was amazing - the visas cost 15ukp each and only took eight minutes to process! We went to the Marbleklong shopping centre and bought a new battery for my camera; recently we have not been able to switch it on, now it is working again.

Bangkok transportation = fleecing gits central. Every taxi and tuk-tuk driver we have encountered has tried to cheat us. Attempting to reach the rather distant Laos Embassy we flagged down a tuk-tuk and told the driver our destination.

TT Driver: "Eighty baht."
clop (expecting a fare of at least B150): "Eighty baht? To the Laos Embassy? Are you sure? It's miles away."
TT Driver nodding a lot: "Yes. Laos Embassy. Eighty baht."
clop: "OK!" And we get in.
TT Driver drives to the bottom of the street and turns the wrong way. clop examines the map on his lap.
clop: "Stop."
TT Driver stops the tuk-tuk.
clop: "Where are you going? Look. We are here. The Laos Embassy is here. You're going the wrong way."
TT Driver nodding a lot: "Yes. OK. Laos Embassy. OK."
TT Driver sets off again and takes another wrong turn, then pulls into the forecourt of the Regent Hotel.
TT Driver: Lots of indecipherable Thai jabbering to the concierge, presumably asking for directions.
Concierge: "Sorry, he thought the embassy was near here but it's a very long way away."
clop: "Yes I know it is. I told him that when we got in."
Concierge: "He says he'll take you there for one hundred and fifty baht."
clop: "No. We agreed eighty baht."
Concierge: "I'm not getting involved. Sort it out with him."
Lots of futile arguing with a driver who can't understand any English.
clop: "Right we're getting out. We'll walk back."
Concierge: "He wants eighty baht."
clop: "What? He wants eighty baht for bringing us further away from the Laos Embassy and making us walk home?"
Concierge: "I'm not getting involved."

So we paid the stupid grinning driver twenty baht and walked half an hour back to our hostel.

In the evening we went to the local Indian restaurant for a curry but, as we approached the door, we saw an S-shaped camp karaoke singer slinking about between the tables (and nobody was eating) so we went to a road-side restaurant instead. There are several brothels on the street outside our hostel.

In the morning we decided to take a taxi to the Laos Embassy. We had been assured by some other backpackers that taxis are always cheaper than tuk-tuks because they are metered and the drivers can't over-charge you.

clip and clop walk out into the street and flag down a taxi.
Taxi Driver: "Hello. Where you want to go?"
clop: "The Laos Embassy."
clop hands Taxi Driver the address written in Thai on a piece of paper.
Taxi Driver: "OK."
clip and clop get in.
Taxi Driver sets off.
clop: "Turn the meter on."
Taxi Driver waves his hand dismissively.
clop: "Turn the meter on."
Taxi Driver: "Two hundred baht."
clop: "Turn the meter on."
Taxi Driver: "OK. One hundred and fifty baht."
clop: "Right. Stop the car."
Taxi Driver: "One hundred and fifty baht."
clop: "Stop the car."
Taxi Driver stops. clip and clop get out. Taxi drives off.

Unbelievable isn't it?

Finally we found a taxi driver who agreed to turn the meter on. The fare to the embassy was only B105! The driver stopped to ask directions from a man urinating against a lamp-post. The Laos visas cost 21ukp each and took forty minutes to process.

We reserved a room at Sala Thai Mansion for Sunday night, left our big rucksacks in their safe room, took another metered taxi to Bangkok train station, took a train to Nakhon Pathom, took another train to Kanchanaburi, walked to Apple's and were successfully reunited with our important plastic wallet again. Even my pet frog is still here. He was back in my boot last night!

Other news: We wrote a letter of "feedback" to Singapore Airlines' head office in Singapore and have received an extremely prompt and sympathetic reply from the London branch of their customer relations department. They have agreed to reinstate all clip's flights. This would have been great news five weeks ago. Sadly, it is now too late to take them up on their offer.

We didn't sleep very well at the Rattanapong Hotel because our room overlooked the main road and Thai motorists do not believe in replacing broken exhaust systems. We booked ourselves onto a half-day tour of Phang Nga Bay with the local Delboy, Mr Kean. Phang Nga is a national park - the entrance fee for Thai visitors is B20 (30p), for foreigners it is B200. What a con. Our tour of the bay was by longtail boat, a huge pointy wooden canoe with an old unsilenced V8 car engine driving a big propeller on a long shaft. We buzzed through a maze of mangrove-lined rivers, sailed under a limestone arch and out into the bay. Phang Nga Bay is extremely cool. Everywhere you look there are dozens of weirdly-shaped tree-clad limestone karsts jutting up 300m out of the sea. We stopped for a while at Khao Phing Kan, better known as "James Bond Island" because it was used as Scaramanga's hideaway in The Man With The Golden Gun. Nowadays it would be better-named "Tat Stall Island." We also stopped at Ko Panyi, a floating Muslim fishing village with wooden walkways between the houses - it was very interesting and clip got to hold a gibbon, but sadly most of the village was tourist-oriented souvenir stalls.

From Phang Nga we caught an incredibly garish local minibus to Takua Pa. The scenery was unique and incredible. We drove along lush green valleys stuffed with banana trees and tall palm trees, and all around us the jagged limestone karsts piercing the sky like massive crumbling shards of chalk. Along the way an old man with a wooden urn boarded the bus and sat next to us, and jabbered at clip in Thai. We couldn't understand anything he was saying and he couldn't understand us either, but he carried on regardless. We think he was laughing that our rucksacks were bigger than his urn.

Our bus out of Takua Pa never showed up. One of the local motorcycle taxi drivers told us it was "dead", possibly involved in an accident, so we had to wait two and a half hours for another bus. Then we were up into the hills on a twisty road to the karst-studded jungle of Khao Sok National Park, where we planned to go walking and do some wildlife-spotting. As soon as we'd climbed down from the bus we were surrounded by a gaggle of screaming grinning portfolio-wielding locals, each trying to persuade us to choose their accommodation. In fact we had already chosen before we arrived and I told them so. "Where you stay?" they shouted in unison. There was an expectant pause. "Nung House," I announced. A huge cheer went up and everybody congratulated the Nung House representative as she led us away to her pick-up truck.

We trekked 14km through the tangled jungle of Khao Sok, scrabbling up and down muddy gullies and wading barefoot through rocky streams. We saw lizards and frogs and many large and beautiful butterflies. We did not see any tapir, loris, bears, gibbons, monkeys, barking deer, snakes, spotted leopard cats, tigers or elephants. Just before we reached the halfway point a torrential downpour began and soaked us through. (The rain was to continue until after midnight - Khao Soak more like.) We were soon wet and tired and miserable, but things were about to get even worse. It wasn't until we sat down on a rock for a rest and a drink of water that we noticed all the leeches on our shoes. One of the leeches managed to get inside clip's sock which initiated an immediate shoe-and-sock-removal emergency. Our rushed squelch back to park headquarters was punctuated by frequent stops to remove leeches from our legs, fingers and necks. As soon as we arrived back at our cabin we stripped naked and used a torch to perform full-body leech checks on each other. Despite not finding any it was less than a minute before I had another one sucking blood out of my shin. We couldn't work out where the pesky things were coming from. When I went in the shower I found two more leeches in my hair.

In addition to following Buddhism most Thais also follow Animism, the belief that spirits live in all natural things, such as land, rocks and trees. It is important not to upset these spirits or they will become malevolent and cause bad things to happen. Therefore, when Thai people build a house, they always provide little ornamental houses nearby for the displaced spirits to live in. These take the form of colourful wooden dollshouses raised up on four to six foot platforms; the higher house for the more-powerful spirits of the land, the lower house for the less-powerful spirits of the home. The lower house often has a cute ladder so that the spirits can get in and out easily. The Thai people regularly put water and rice and flowers on the platforms to keep the spirits happy. The grandness of the spirit houses is supposed to mirror the grandness of the Thai house; therefore, if any improvements are ever made to the Thai house, the spirit houses must be similarly improved.

We caught a bus from Khao Soak to Surat Thani train station and bought tickets for the 2015 overnight train to Bangkok. All the sleepers were full so we ended up in second class seats. Now I don't know if I suffer from a genetic abnormality but, unlike other passengers who seem to start snoring before the train has even set off, I find it impossible to sleep sitting upright in a chair. First my head falls one way, then it falls the other way, then my neck starts to hurt so I try to sit sideways in the seat, but then the chair arm presses into my leg and I know full well this position isn't going to work but I stick with it anyway just in case I'm wrong, but then my feet go funny and I feel like I want to go jogging, so then I move my foot an inch and my pillow falls down and my neck stretches too far, and then my bum starts to hurt, so then I sit up and look around in exasperation to see if anyone else is having the same problems but everyone else is fast asleep already, so then I lie my head on the tray table and it feels really great for about ten seconds until I realise that the top of my skull is pressing painfully against the back of the seat in front and the edge of the tray table is digging into my ribs, so I sit back and think I've found a whole new comfortable position, but then my nose starts itching and I try to ignore it but eventually I have to rub it and so I lose the new comfortable position for ever, and then clip starts moving about, and so on for the rest of the journey.

At dawn, as our train jolted and creaked through Bangkok's northern suburbs, we saw real poverty. Mile after mile of densely-packed deprivation. Two- and three-storey slums made from bits of wood, worn thatching and panels of rusty corrugated iron, backing onto rancid watercourses and stretching up to the railway line. And filthy barefoot children in torn clothes, standing silently beside smoking fires and piles of rubbish, watching the train go by. We squeaked to a halt in Bangkok at 0630.

We walked 5km to the Vietnam embassy and arrived just as it opened at 8am. Visas for Vietnam cost 29ukp and take four days to issue, so to avoid having to hang about, our plan was to leave our passports in Bangkok and visit Kanchanaburi for a few days.

Thai people are forever nodding and smiling at each other; it's as if they all know each other from school. Instead of living they seem to be playing. Riding around on mopeds with no helmets on, hanging off songthaews and out of train doorways, shopping at the market for bagfuls of vegetables; everyone is happy and having a good time. Unfortunately, apparent-friendliness towards foreigners often comes at a price. No matter how genuine someone appears to be there is always a hidden agenda involving a "friend's accommodation" or a commission scam. A bloke stopped to chat to us in Bangkok and we thought he was just being helpful when he got us a cheap tuk-tuk to the local TAT (Government Tourist Association of Thailand) information office, until we arrived at a TAT-licensed information office. The licensed TAT offices are not there to dispense impartial information - they're there to make money out of ticket/tour booking fees and minivan fares and they're quite happy to lie to get money out of you. And so, at 10:30am, the following conversation takes place:

TAT man with big smile: "Hello. How are you? Welcome to Thailand. How can I help you?"
clop: "Hello. Today we want to go to Kanchanaburi. How do we get there?"
TAT man looks vaguely towards the clock and frowns dramatically.
TAT man: "The train has, ahhh, gone today. It left this morning so you've got two options."
TAT man develops troubled tone of voice.
TAT man: "Number one, (sigh). Get a local bus from here to the Southern Bus Station which will cost B120-150 per person and be very busy because it's a big Thai holiday, and then another bus from the Southern Bus Station to Kanchanaburi which will take three and a half hours because it's always stopping stopping stopping and it will cost B200-300 per person. A total of B640-900."
clop: "Aha."
TAT man: "Or..."
TAT man suddenly develops a brighter tone of voice.
TAT man: "Number two. You take a minivan from here directly to Kanchanaburi which will be very fast and cost B385 per person! A total of B770 and you will be there at 1:30pm!"
clop undergoes sudden dawning realisation.
clop: "Right, well time isn't a problem and the minivan is too expensive. Actually, our guide book says there is a train this afternoon."
At this point TAT man's memory strangely returned.
TAT man: "Yes, the train is at two o'clock."
And then he started sulking.
TAT man with his lip out: "Can I help you with anything else?"

And so we took the train directly to Kanchanaburi and it cost us B25 each.

One last meal at the night market in Kota Bharu - bright blue rice, some chicken mulch and a banana pancake (pisang murtabak) - then we were up and off to the Thai border in a share taxi with a Swiss couple; the lad looking like one of the Yorkshiremen in Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch, complete with a flat cap a la Swaledale shepherd, and the lass whose 'fashion statement' was to have one (and only one, very important) trouser-leg rolled up to the knee.

We acquired two Malaysia exit stamps in our passports, walked 1km across a bridge over the River Kolok and entered Thailand. The time changed from 10am to 9am. The currency changed from the Ringgit to the Baht. The predominant religion changed from Islam to Buddhism. The year changed from 2003 to 2546. Writing changed from Roman script to Thai script (more on this later). From the border it was a fifteen minute walk to Sungai Kolok train station.

We had already been warned that Thai minivan/taxi drivers would try to scam us at every available opportunity. Sure enough, we had only been walking for three minutes when I was approached by one.

Minivan Scamster : "Hello! Where you from?"
clop : "Hello. England."
MS : "Ah, England. Where you going?"
clop : "Surat Thani, on the train."
MS : "Train to Surat Thani not until three o'clock. You need minivan."
clop : "No thanks, we're going on the train."
MS : "Train not until three o'clock. I have minivan."
clop : "No, the train is at eleven fifty-five."
MS : "Actually, train is at eleven fifty. See you."

After our experience in third class on the Malaysian jungle train we decided to pay a bit extra and travel second class in Thailand. Consequently, we spent the entire nine hour journey shivering in an air-conditioned compartment; cost 5.30ukp. We arrived at Surat Thani around 9pm and were immediately pounced upon by the waiting taxi drivers.

Taxi Driver 1 : "Hello. Where you going?"
clop : "Hello. We're going to the night ferry. How much to the pier?"
Taxi Driver 1 : "Forty baht each."
clop : "You've got to be joking. We'll pay twenty each."
Taxi Driver 1 : "Twenty?! Is impossible."
clop : "OK, we'll go with someone else. Bye."

clop et al start to walk away. Taxi Driver 2 sidles up. Taxi Driver 1 panics.

Taxi Driver 1 : "OK I give you special price. Thirty five baht each."
clop : "Twenty."
Taxi Driver 1 : "Is impossible."
clop : "Bye."

Taxi Driver 2 : "Hello. Where you going?"
clop : "The night ferry. How much?"
Taxi Driver 2 : "Thirty baht each."
clop : "Twenty five."
Taxi Driver 2 : "OK."

This kind of haggling applies to almost everything in Asia. It is good fun at first but it gets tiring after a while.

So we arrive at the night ferry for the seven hour journey to the island of Koh Pha Ngan, 100km away (3.10ukp). The ferry was big and wooden. We had to walk across a bouncy plank to get on board. clip got stuck. The ferry was full of other travellers. The passenger deck floor was tiled with grimey mattresses, marked out into eighty "beds". As soon as the ferry set off at 11pm, all the lights went out and everyone fell asleep. clip went to the squat toilet during the night and almost walked off the lower deck into the sea.

We arrived at Koh Pha Ngan at 6am. The taxi drivers pounced, no haggling this time; a flat B50 fare to Haad Rin in a songthaew. A songthaew is a semi-open ute cum pick-up truck with two long benches facing each other in the back. The songthaews don't set off until they're full. They managed to get fourteen people in ours, including a Buddhist monk in the front seat. We saw another with twenty four people in it. The 10km journey to Haad Rin took half an hour along bumpy muddy dirt roads; we arrived at 7am and here started the worst four days of the trip so far.

We went to Haad Rin for the full moon beach party on the 10th. Apparently this party is famous throughout the world. It has taken place every month since 1989. Between 5000 and 8000 people turn up. You can probably guess how this has affected the "beautiful island" of Koh Pha Ngan. Haad Rin itself is the epitome of unbridled hedonism. Bars, bars, tacky accommodation, bars, noise, fast food stalls, bars, shops, touts, bars, rubbish, prostitutes, bars and bars. And walking around, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of (sorry mother, shut your eyes for this bit) utter dickheads strutting about and trying to be as cool as possible. And in Haad Rin, being cool means wearing designer sunglasses (like everyone else), having a henna tattoo (like everyone else), wearing baggy Asian fisherman's pants (like everyone else), wearing a Red Bull or Chang Beer or Same Same But Different top (like everyone else), having your hair coloured or braided with some beads (like everyone else), carrying a big scoopy beach bag (like everyone else), never saying hello to anyone, never being friendly, never smiling, then hiring a piddly go-faster-stripe moped and riding it like a dog with two dicks despite the fact that you've probably never been on a motorcycle before in your life and almost fall off every ten seconds. My efforts to be friendly backfired every time - every time I said hello to anyone they looked startled and hurried on.

During the day everyone either sat on the beach and got sunburned or sat in one of the bars and watched a low quality VCD film on a big television. At night everyone got pissed out of their heads. When we arrived at 7am on the 7th, people were staggering around drunk and music was pumping out across the beach.

We stayed at Lighthouse Bungalows, about fifteen minutes away from the party beach on a rocky headland, with a very nice view across to the next island, Koh Samui.

We were bored out of our heads for the next two days until Aries and Sandrine arrived from Penang and we had someone normal to talk to. We all went out for a quiet drink the night before the party and completely overdid it. I spent the next day feeling very very poorly.

We set off to the Full Moon Party at 10pm. I'm sure the party was great five or ten years ago but now it is so big and commercial that it has no atmosphere. Everyone was smiling but it felt so false considering how miserable everyone had been in the days leading up to the party (a bit like New Year's Eve). Everyone on the beach was drunk or on pills or both. The music was extremely good. There were also lots of fire twirlers about to watch. We met Matt.

Around 3am a huge bald kickboxing-gym-owning nightclub bouncer from Bromley, London scanned the dark beach of 6000 ravers and picked me out as the best person to fight him. It was the closest I have come to physical violence on the trip; typical that it would come from someone from the UK. It turned out the bouncer was on a two-week holiday and suddenly I understood - so was almost everyone else. People come to Thailand for a holiday and go on a side-trip to the Full Moon Party while they are here. This explained everything. We left Aries and Sandrine at the party at 4:30am and went to bed.

We got up at 8am. The party was still going at 11am. There were a lot of very ill people about. We got a songthaew back to the jetty, caught the 2pm express ferry to the mainland and from there took a very hot bus to the Derek Tour terminal in Surat Thani. As the rucksacks were being unloaded from the bus a huge chunky (7 inches long and 1 inch wide) red and yellow centipede appeared amongst them. Even the Thai people panicked - the centipedes can apparently deliver a painful bite. The driver had to stamp on it for ages to kill it. People laughed. Clearly it was not acceptable to simply let it scurry off into the jungle. I wonder how everyone would have reacted if I had stamped a turtle to death in front of them.

At 7pm our minivan set off en route to Phang Nga. Two hours later the driver tried to drop us off at a petrol station miles away from the town. He didn't speak any English so it took a while, using the bi-lingual services of a handy English-speaking Thai prostitute, to persuade him to take us where we wanted to go. We finally reached the bus station in Phang Nga around 9:30pm with no accommodation booked.

Here is where Thai script becomes a problem. The Thai people do not use the Roman alphabet; they have their own alphabet of squiggles and marks. Squiggles represent different sounds, but each sound can mean several different things depending on how you say it - low tone, mid tone, high tone, rising tone or falling tone. Even numbers are different. Consequently it is impossible to read anything written in Thai out loud. You can't even begin to guess what a word sounds like. There is an overview here. This also means that it is impossible to accurately represent Thai sounds using the Roman alphabet, and so makes it hard for us to learn any. So far we have only learnt "Hello" (approx. "Sawat Dee Crap" for me, or "Sawat Dee Car" for clip) and "Thank You" (approx. "Karp Kun Crap" for me, or "Karp Kun Car" for clip).

We ended up at the unfortunately-named "Rattanapong Hotel".

clip says I am being adventurous with the Asian food but I do draw the line at certain things. Despite many restaurants offering it, I have yet to summon up the courage to order "Fried Morning Glory."

Posted by clip

I was just starting to get used to the conditions in South East Asia when a snake slithered by me in our hut on the Perhentian Islands, so now I'm right back to square one.

We have now left Malaysia for Thailand. I would like to say that I enjoyed Malaysia tremendously but I would be lying. What with the staring gawping gangs that collected on all street corners near-dribbling at the sight of a white girl, the stomach-churning stenchs emanating from all uncovered drains, the thousands of squeaking rats running loose over the streets at night and the overall "I'm in a junkyard" feel, I don't think I'll be rushing back there again.

clop has been a lot more adventurous with the food on offer. I decided to stick to veggie dishes, thinking they would be safer, but, after nearly breaking my teeth on various pieces of bone in my vegetable fried rice, I'm now on a fruit diet. Rambutan, langkow (sp?) - once you remove all the ants scribbling over the outside the taste is really quite nice.

Malay and Thai men all seem to participate in a very noisy snooking competition, regularly making as much noise as possible trying to hawk as much gob on the pavement as they possibly can.

The official Thai men are extremely well-dressed, wearing one-size-too-small shirts and trousers, and shoes and belts so shiny they look to be made of glass. The railway police wear berets at a jaunty angle, making them look like somebody out of a Benny Hill sketch. The scary-looking ticket officials are armed with nail clippers which they carry in a rather nifty little belt attachment.

The more travellers we meet (and we are starting to meet more and more of them) the braver and more excited I get about our travels. It has made me want to learn other languages (not Thai) and see more places. It also suddenly seems not long until the end of the trip so I'm trying to get as much as possible out of it now.

Where was I?

Malaysia is chiefly a muslim country. Alcohol is widely prohibited. Many of the men wear muslim caps. Most of the women wear head shawls. There are hardly any white people anywhere. Consequently, the sight of a pretty young white girl in summery clothes (clip) causes all the blokes to stare (leer) openly. Fifty at a time. The whole street stares. Car drivers and moped riders stare so much they almost crash. They stare and stare and stare. clip doesn't like them all staring - she stares back but they don't look away.

Everything in Malaysia is grimey or tatty or falling to pieces somehow. There are no pavements so you have to wind your way between parked cars, along shop fronts and over the partly-covered six-feet-deep concrete open gutters which line the roads and double as drains and are all half full of stinking putrid water and rubbish. Nobody seems to care about keeping the place looking nice. Everywhere you look there are piles of building supplies or heaps of rubble with twisted iron bars sticking out. From the outside most buildings look like utter shit.

We visited the Muzium Rakyat (People's Museum) in Melaka. The top floor held the Museum of Enduring Beauty, an exhibition presenting the various ways in which different peoples of the world perceive beauty, and the lengths that they go to to achieve it. There was a large section on 'footbinding', a Chinese beauty treatment that involved smashing the bones in a baby's feet and binding the broken toes back under the heel to force the feet to develop as short as possible. This was normal practice in China for over a thousand years. Apparently, Chinese men found the shuffling gait of footbound women, and the smell of their dirty binding bandages, sexually arousing. There were also exhibits of lip plates, neck rings, tattooing, scarification, dental mutilation (including knocking teeth out with rocks to reduce resemblence to animals, filing teeth to sharp points, and blackening them - "beauty is a mouthful of black teeth"), ear rings, nose bars, and head deformation (where newborn babies have wooden planks clamped to their foreheads which are then progressively tightened using wingnuts to make the skull develop with a huge flat forehead or an elongated dome).

We went out for some banana leaf curries - 50p for a whole meal.

We took a bus north to the capital city, Kuala Lumpur (2hr) and stayed for less than an hour. We arrived at Pudu Raya Bus Station, a nightmare of fumes, noise and people, and obviously holding a subterranean competition to see how many buses could be crammed into the smallest possible space. We took a train across the city centre to Peikiling Bus Station and ate our sandwiches (neither of us fancied Noba Burger) on the riverbank - the river a slowly-flowing emulsion with plastic bottles, bags and other rubbish floating in it. We took another bus, inland to Mentakab (2.5hr).

Our hotel in Mentakab did not have a shower. We used a traditional mandi instead, a kind of tiled corner sink/bath full of cold water. You scoop the water out with a pail (clip called it a Tommy Tippee Potty) and throw it over yourself. It's important not to contaminate the mandi water with soap or shampoo. We made a right mess of the bathroom.

Our reason for going to Mentakab was to catch the Jungle Railway - a train that chugs right up through the mountainous jungles of the Malaysian interior to Kota Bharu on the north eastern coast. The train was waiting for us in Mentakab station. We had to climb down off the platform and walk across another railway line with our rucksacks on to board it. We were on the mail train so it took 11 hours, much of it spent sitting in sidings waiting for other trains to pass, and we were in third class (2.50ukp each) so there was no air-conditioning - just dirty broken fans and smoking staring people. The jungle foliage dragged along the sides of the train. Twigs and leaves snapped off and fell in our laps. We stood in the doorways and stuck our heads out, when we could! Unfortunately the train was infested with flying cockroaches and at dusk they came out of the woodwork and flew up onto our arms and legs. clip didn't like the cockroaches very much.

We spent two nights in Kota Bharu, an interesting city famous for its traditional handicrafts, such as kite-making, top-spinning and "kicking of a shuttlecock". We ate sayur murtabak (vegetable pancakes) at the night market. We saw a group perform dikir barat, a traditional form of music involving a troupe of seated clapping shouting youths, bongo and tom-tom drums, and a man wailing into a microphone. It was brilliant. A rat ran past us.

Then we shared a taxi with Matt and Naomi down the coast to Kuala Besut to catch the slow ferry to the Perhentian Islands 22km offshore. The "ferry" was a bright yellow knackered wooden fishing boat with plastic patio chairs nailed to the deck. As usual, we had to clamber with our rucksacks across four other fishing boats to reach the "ferry". We stayed in a wooden A-frame hut on the larger of the two Perhentian Islands, Pulau Perhentian Besar, in Flora Bay. There was no jetty and the bay was too shallow for the ferry so a small boat came out from the beach to pick us up.

Four lovely lazy island days. The island had no electricity supply so everything ran off generators. We met up with Aries and Sandrine again. We made friends with Thomas, Elisabeth, Marc, Nardia, Chris and Raphael. We trekked through jungle and saw black monkeys with white eyes and white lips. The monkeys threw things at us. We saw monitor lizards so big that Matt mistook one for a crocodile. We saw flying squirrels. We sunbathed. We drank pop. We spent hours and hours snorkelling over coral reefs and saw barracuda, stingrays and sharks! We swam above dozens of metre-long Green Sea Turtles and watched them grazing on the sandy seabed below - they surfaced for air right beside us. Every day it was 33C and sunny. Every night there was a thunderstorm and the temperature dropped to 27C - we got cold and slept under a wool blanket.

One evening we got lost. We were on an abandoned beach and couldn't find the jungle path home. In the dark we stumbled through some weird yellow ant/spider things and they attacked us by sticking spikes into our feet - the spikes hurt a lot but when you tried to pull the ants/spiders off, their legs and bodies came away and left the heads and spikes in your foot. The spikes were barbed so pulling the heads out was seriously unpleasant. In the end we got some locals to take us home in a speedboat but it was dark and they got it stuck on a coral reef out at sea. When we finally got home clip found a rat in the toilet.

We washed our clothes but we needn't have bothered. It was too humid to dry them. All our clothes stink.

We met quite a few package holidaymakers on the island. I hope I will be able to adjust to having two week holidays again one day.

On our last night we went to a beach party. The beer was too expensive but Chris the American gave us half a bottle of red wine and some mandarin vodka. We walked back along the beach and found a snake in our hut, wrapped around clip's rucksack. She was very tense that night, even after the snake had gone.

This is much more like the kind of travelling I was expecting. Now that we can afford to stay in hostels and eat out we are meeting lots of other travellers and doing things with them. I hope to make some life-long friends.

We left the island this morning - little boat out to coloured knackered fishing boat ferry with cockroaches, ferry back to Kuala Besut, clamber off across three other boats, and a share taxi with Gin and Michelle to hostel with cockroaches in Kota Bharu. Tomorrow we plan to cross the border into Thailand, take a train north from Sungai Kolok to Surat Thani, then a seven hour ferry to Ko Pha Ngan in time for the 5000-strong Full Moon Party at Hat Rin on the 10th.