People,

Ten hour flights are the best things in the world! All right, maybe not quite the best, but ours was surprisingly good.

About half an hour in some woman turned up offering us drinks... I asked her if she took Thai money as I had spent all my English cash.... she informed me that all the drinks were free. Free!! Who would have believed it? Then they gave us three meals. Three!! And more drinks!! And they put films and stuff on. Good films too!! Well, one good film... but then you can sleep through the bad ones!

Anyway, we got in at 6AM local time, and after a failed attempt to ring Hawkes (my mate who was sorting us out a place to stay), we jumped in a taxi.

It was hot outside. And I mean like silly hot. Even though it was 6AM it was the hottest thing the world has ever seen. No sun or anything, just heat. Really thick air and the like.

But better than England.

Got a taxi to the Kho San road, which is Backpacker Central, and found Hawkesy sat outside some bar with cold drinks on standby. He took us to out hotel which was nicer than most the places we stayed in Europe, and had Air conditioning and everything. Air conditioning, we soon realised, is the most important thing in the entire world by a long, long way.

And then we slept all day. Jet lag, don't you know. At night we met Hawkes and his girlfriend and ate some good food (Chicken in cashew nuts and noodles with vegtables for about one pound fifty). Then we went out for many drinks. The Kho San road at night is what Thailand should look like. The road is closed off to cars and filled up with stalls and dodgy types, and everything else is all neon and loud. We went to a few different bars and drank a variety of coloured liquid. Although everything is pretty cheap here, drinking is not quite as cheap. Its better than England, but still, it just makes you realise how cheap everything else is. We were drinking these jugs of cocktails for about 500 baht, which is about 8 quid. Quite reasonable, but when you consider that it's the same price as a double air conditioned room with en suite and a telly, you kind of worry.

Or just drink more.

Then we decided to eat scorpion. There was this stall outside with maggots, grasshoppers, cockroaches and scorpions, and I had made the mistake of saying I would eat a scorpion but wouldn't pay for it. This kind of went on until the four of us had agreed to eat one each. So we bought five, made the woman that sold us them eat one to prove they were actually edible and not just a tourist joke, and then went down the alley back towards the hotel (figuring that we could vomit in safety)

And then Marie-Louise just bit off one of the claws! No psych up, no nothing. Just ate it. Not wanting to be shown up I had to tuck in. Eating scorpion is quite an odd process. The shell is very hard and chewy, so you have to swallow it in bits. The claws and the head are all right, but the arse tastes disgusting - it's all soft. Then the tail is a breeze.

Anyway.... we're off out to some bar in a bit to watch Harry Potter 2 on the telly - quite a nice arrangement they have here. they just pirate films as soon as they're released and then show them in bars. It's great! There are menus and stuff with showing times. We're hoping that we'll be able to watch Die Another Day soon.... that would be sweet.

Also, we slept all day today in air conditioned bliss recovering from last night (Marie Louise was only sick twice! A definate improvement on Turkey), so we havn't actually been outside in the daytime yet.... that pleasure we're saving to tommorow. If it's too hot at 6AM and at midnight, I can only imagine what kind of hell it will be tommorow.

But it's all cool.

Love to all,


Mike