When you spend your life travelling around the world and soaking up exotic cultures - by which I mean experiencing the traditions of other countries rather than cultivating strange foreign diseases - you tend to find yourself scratching your head in confusion for much of the time. This is because the things we take for granted back home are often as alien to people on the other side of the world as a 42 inch plasma wide screen television might be to a leopard, and vice versa. In Hong Kong, for example, I once spent the best part of half an hour trying to persuade the nice young lady at a restaurant to bring me a cup of tea. She spoke perfect English, was able to engage me in quite an in-depth discussion about the trip I was on, and seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of places in England that I hadn't even heard of myself - but the word "tea" simply wasn't in her vocabulary. This, I hasten to add, in China - where most of the bloody stuff comes from. In the end, I happened to notice a waitress carrying a box containing more varieties of tea than I could list in a week to a man at the next table, and was able to point in that way that English people do when all else fails. "Oh," my waitress cried, flinging her arms in the air in exasperation, "you want TEA!".

The journey to the airport this morning was an experience, to say the least. To start with, the company that was sending a car for us had somehow managed to overbook it - so when the taxi finally turned up, there were already far more people inside than there were seats. This flummoxed the taxi driver ever so slightly, and resulted in a few minutes of thoughtful chin rubbing and repeated glances between me and the inside of his cab as though he was expecting a solution to suddenly present itself. Then, just as I thought he might be about to suggest that I sit on the roof for the duration of the journey, he made a gesture at the four people already on the back seat and one of them begrudgingly climbed over into the boot where she spent the next half an hour sitting on the spare tyre. I felt a little guilty about this, to be honest.

The taxi itself had clearly been cobbled together from spare parts found at the local dump. You expect to bounce about a bit in cars here due to the lack of properly paved roads, but I'm honestly surprised my head didn't go through the roof on any of the seventy or so occasions on which the two collided. No seat belts, you see - just another of the wonderful safety precautions we take for granted back home that they simply couldn't be bothered with here. Don't get me wrong - they have seat belt laws, it's just that most people don't take the blindest bit of notice or have cars that are slightly older than the universe and have therefore never been fitted with them. Every few minutes, we had to pull over to the side of the road while the driver got out and inspected our luggage, which was attached to the roof by not much more than a couple of pieces of string. If it was still there, he would then get back in and we'd be on our way. Presumably, his eagerness to check the roof this often suggests that it isn't at all unusual to have to go back for a suitcase of frilly knickers that have scattered themselves across the road. Not that this is the only thing I keep in my suitcase, you understand.

Halfway to the airport, things got even stranger. Without warning, our driver pulled over to the side of the road and engaged the shaky wooden stick we now assumed to be a hand brake. Sitting on the grass verge was a young girl with a box of flower garlands, and as we came to a halt she jumped up eagerly and approached the driver's window where he quickly sorted through her wares and pulled out what looked like a small wreath. Plucking a similar garland from a peg over the dashboard, he handed it to the girl in exchange for the new one before putting both hands together and praying for several minutes. At no point were any of us told what was going on, and we just sat in stunned silence hoping that the plane wasn't going to leave without us. Then, as quickly as the incident had begun, it was over and we found ourselves on our way once again as though nothing had happened. Of course, it's things like this which make international travel interesting and supply me with enough anecdotes to fill my blog, so anything that makes the day a little more unusual than the last is fine by me. I wasn't sure about some of my fellow passengers, though, who were muttering amongst themselves by the time we reached the airport and threatening to write all sorts of snotty letters - I don't know why these people go on holiday in the first place if they just expect everything to be like it is back home. A similar incident occurred in early 2010 back in North London, when the Muslim driver of the number 24 bus suddenly stopped his vehicle in Gospel Oak and left the engine running while he laid out his bright yellow fluorescent jacket on the floor as a prayer mat and proceeded to spend five minutes praying. The reaction of the British public ranged from people who understood completely to those who thought the driver should immediately be sacked, flogged, or both. Some of the passengers on the bus, bless them, even said that they were afraid that the driver was about to blow them all up. We have established rather a reputation for over-reaction in Britain when things like this happen, the internet lighting up with ridiculous comments such as "It wouldn't happen anywhere else". Well, I'm here to tell you that it would, and frequently does - and you know what? It doesn't matter.

At the airport, I made my way to the check-in desk only to discover that it wasn't yet open. This was fine because the excitement of the morning so far had given me enough of a headache that I just wanted to throw a couple of paracetamol down my throat and sit quietly in a nearby cafe for an hour before doing anything else. Unfortunately, when I returned a little later sans headache, the lady at the desk informed me that I was in the wrong terminal and that I had a little over twenty minutes to walk two miles to the other one. They like to do things like this at airports, just to keep you on your toes. I arrived in the nick of time, puffing and wheezing, at the place at which the taxi had been supposed to drop me in the first place, only to be told by a smiling Thai check-in clerk that I could've simply picked up the white courtesy phone and asked for the free shuttle. It was at about this point that I lost the will to live.

Still, I'm here now and that's the main thing. I'm staying for the next three nights at the AMARI Corel Beach Resort, a delightful hillside hotel at one end of Patong Beach which does its best to blend into the scenery and the hillside in order to look like somewhere a James Bond villain might like to call home. The complex, mostly hidden away inside the hillside, is full of mysterious winding corridors which suddenly emerge onto panoramic viewing terraces, private beaches, swimming pools with a vanishing point into the crystal waters of the Andaman sea, and subterranean torture chambers. Okay, so I may have made that last one up. It's about a ten to twenty minute walk from the hotel to the vibrant nightlife of Patong, depending on how eager you are to get there, but much of this consists of the long walk along the exclusive driveway which meanders down the hill, so you can look at the view and pretend you're Scaramanga on the way. I'm not here for the nightlife anyway, and will be spending most of the next three days island hopping or exploring Phuket beyond the beach, so if you're expecting a debauched description of life after dark in the Thai capital of hedonism then you've come to the wrong place.

Phuket, which is pronounced "pooket" for those of you who haven't yet stopped giggling like school children, is both Thailand's largest island and second smallest province at approximately 30 miles by 13. It is connected to the mainland by 3 bridges - one called the Thepkasattri Bridge and the other two both called Sarasin. Giving different names to different bridges is obviously far too much of a good idea for the Phuket town planners, so they chose instead to ensure that tourists could continue to get lost for many years to come. Sarasin 2, as it quickly became known, was officially opened on the 1st of August 2011, easing traffic flow while at the same time allowing even more party people to cram themselves onto the island on a regular basis. Just over a month later, the bridge hit the headlines again when a local man by the name of Thanawat Mingsuwan decided to stop his motor bike half way across, dismount, climb over the concrete safety barrier and hurl himself into the water below for no apparent reason. After being rescued, Mr Mingsuwan was not particularly forthcoming about his reasons for the leap, appearing to be far more interested in making sure he was transferred to a hospital where he had the right sort of insurance. The incident does, however, bring back haunting memories for locals of the tragic story of Dam and Gew - Thailand's Romeo and Juliet. Two star-crossed lovers who met and fell in love around the time of the construction of the original Sarasin Bridge in the early 1970s, Dam was a simple bus driver and Gew a young student who rode his bus to college every day. Over the weeks and months, they fell in love, but it was a love forbidden by Gew's father - his daughter, he insisted, would never marry a penniless bus driver from a poor family. On the night of the 22nd of February 1973, Dam and Gew snuck away into the night to meet up on the Sarasin Bridge. Tying themselves together with a simple loincloth to represent their eternal bond of love for each other, they attached a heavy rock to themselves and leapt to their deaths. The next morning, as heartbroken villagers pulled the bodies from the river and attempted to separate them, Gew's father appeared through the crowd: "Leave them be," he said, "for I have attempted to pull them apart many times without success and I have paid the price. Let them finally be together for all eternity."

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.