You know when you need to go to the toilet at half past six in the morning, but you haven't properly woken up, so when you get up to go you're actually sleepwalking, and with the added factor of it being your first night in new, unfamiliar surroundings, instead of opening the door, you open the window of your first floor guesthouse room, climb out, and drop down onto the roof of the adjacent, single floor building, where the guesthouse owners live, which it turns out can't take your weight, so the roof tiles break, and at this point you actually wake up, finding yourself half dangling through the roof, in the positions of both having to comprehend the situation yourself and also explain it to the owners, with whom you don't share a language, all of which incurs a repair cost of five hundred baht, completely negating the low cost of the incredibly cheap room you'd tried so hard to find in the first place? That happens to everyone now and again, doesn't it? Good, thought so, that's a relief.

Just passing through Bangkok again, incidentally, to pick up my new passport on the way to meeting Ed from uni in Phuket, to do some diving. And maybe have a beer or two, we'll see.

Working on the farm up north was brilliant, but as usual, blog entries are materialising haphazardly, so I'll elaborate on that soon, sometime either before or after I finish updating our time spent in Laos in February!

…now a day later. More passport fun! I got the new one without incident, and to my immense satisfaction, had it in my hands at about half past nine on Monday morning, having got up early, hopped straight on a bus, and found no queue at the embassy. Which left me with a couple of hours to get my Thailand visa transferred from old passport to new, and I'd be able to check out before midday and find a bus to Phuket the same afternoon. …only it never works out that easily, of course! By ten o'clock I'd got half way to the immigration office, again good progress, via the "Skytrain" (think underground, but over ground, perched on massive concrete stilts). By eleven o'clock, I'd walked to the bus station a kilometre or so away, been sent from one end of it to the other (a ten minute walk, it's huge) by a friendly, helpful Thai, then back again by another, to still not find the van to the immigration office I was looking for, got a local bus instead, which turned out had to be two, with a connection, and was dropped off by the first one outside the Skytrain station I'd been at precisely an hour earlier. Brilliant. But progress in terms of local transport knowledge, at least, if not yardage. So I got on the second bus, and off it at about half eleven, to then realise the real scale of the misleadingly simple map the embassy had given me, the two centimetres walk taking twenty minutes. And at ten to midday, I got to the front desk of the office, to be told I had to make some photocopies, and that lunch was between twelve and one, so come back with them after one. Which I did, to be informed by the lady I was ultimately sat in front of that I didn't need to transfer the visa after all, contrary to the advice of my own (reliable, knowledgeable?) embassy, as I was still planning on leaving before the end of it, so I would just need to present both passports on exit, at the border. Wonderful. So I left, at half one, and by four o'clock, after the longest set of local buses ever I've ridden on to cover a journey of about ten kilometers (did I mention it turns out they moved the immigration office a couple of years ago, from a convenient, central location, to out in the middle of nowhere), blitzing any records we'd set in Chinese cities, I got back to my guesthouse.

Although I still managed to get a bus ticket to Phuket, with an hour to spare, and only a seventy-five baht late check out fee (Thais are great, despite possibly not being their favourite customer of all time, I still departed to a wave and a smile!), and if I hadn't been sitting on a variety of local buses, I'm sure I wouldn't have done anything that much more productive anyway, so I guess no harm done!