We'd had a great time in Bangkok and hooked up with an excellent chap, Martin...who was a proper world traveller and is now based in India and has been for 25 years. Martin was very good company and joined us wandering Bangkok. We actually stayed very local, we wandered Chinatown and ate at the local food stalls. This is the best way to get a feel for Bangkok, just keep walking and use your local food stalls. The food is excellent and cheap and so was the local grog. No stomach aches or anything ropey. We negotiated with the Longboat owner and got the 3 of us on a 2 hour trip for a good price. The longboats are the ones they used on the James Bond film and they can fly...they're not very stable and the driver was constantly shouting for us to move this way and that way so he could open the throttle. We went round the Klongs (canals) and that's always a good way to see real life. It has changed a bit over the years and the poverty that once resided there has almost vanished. Kids still wave and jump into the Klongs and it's still worth doing. We did the cumpulsory thing and got to the floating Singha sales lady and bought a beer for ourselves and 1 for the driver, which always cheers them up and they feel more inclined to give you your money's worth. It was a blast....literally.

The next day we planned the trip to the airport, we were going to get the train but there were big protests at the station and so nothing was moving, so that was a no go. We planned it meticulously, we packed, checked out and said goobyes to the many travelling peoples we had met there. We then had an hour to wait for the taxi driver who was a nice a guy and we had agreed everything with him. We enjoyed sitting at the local food stall and made the most of it. Then our man showed up and off we went. An hour later we got off and went to check in. We then realised our man had dropped us off at the wrong Airport. There's now 2 airports in Bangkok and he'd taken us to the new one, we needed to be at the old one...and as usual we were running out of time. We had told our man which airport to go to so who knows what happened. It can only happen to us. So now it's back to dry retching with worry.......in the end we had to pay a bit over the odds for a local speed merchant to get us there in double quick time......we made it by the skin of our teeth...better to lose a bit of money dicing with death to get there than to miss the flights and have to cough up again. It was a sickening couple of hours. We have now made it to Hong Kong ...................