Back to Bangkok again - 28th January

... we check into a hotel which is cheap, but has a cold shower on the balcony - although the upside is that we are able to use free wi-fi from the hotel over the road.We spend our time doing some souvenir shopping with Keren, and finally make it to the Grand Palace.Our goodbye meal with Kez is a quiet affair, and we're both sad to see her go.

Dave's picked up a lurgy in the night, so I escort Keren (with the right bag), to the airport the following day, and when I get back it turns out we've both picked up some kind of super cold that Keren was fighting when she first arrived in Thailand.We decide to succumb to our ailments, and spend a few days recuperating in our hotel room, only really venturing out to eat and fetch more cough mixture and cold remedies.

We are also alarmed to discover more and more bugs in our room - they look like small woodlice, and disintegrate into a little pool of blood with the gentlest tap... it seems that the hotel has a little pest problem that they haven't thought to mention, and we notice that several of the rooms have towels under the doors (we assume to aid fumigation).

We've got a couple of weeks before we head to Sydney, and decide that hanging around in Bangkok is not only expensive, but not really doing us any good.We have a plan: we're going back to Bottle Beach.

We catch up with some admin and buy tickets for the coach and catamaran with the company that we used to get back from Bottle Beach previously.I post off my insurance claim, and we go to retrieve some missing laundry from the old lady next door, who does it for 25 baht a kilogram... unfortunately, the bargain price came with the penalty of not always getting everything back, as we discovered when one of my t-shirts went missing.I was also left in the embarrassing predicament of having to wave my (clean) knickers at the lady to explain that another pair the same had gone missing - if they hadn't been expensive Rohan travel knickers, I'm not sure I'd have braved it.Dave, by the way, hid down the road laughing.

We decide to put our big rucksacks in storage at the hotel, and to just take a small bag each.We also stock up on a few more padlocks, and prepare for a sleepless journey.However, not to worry - the coach journey back down to Koh Phan Ngan proves to be uneventful, and we're smug about not having to queue for anything and being pretty flexible with our reduced baggage.

However, all that changed once we got on the catamaran... nothing bad happened, it's just that the sea was so choppy that we both spent the majority of the four hour journey leaning over the back deck of the boat, along with the rest of the passengers.We'd taken travel sickness tablets, but to no effect - it's all we can do to make hand signals to each other to describe the state of play (mostly thumbs down).The boat crew are fantastic - they dish out the anti-nausea remedy of tiger balm, sick bags and kind pats on the shoulder as if they were going out of fashion, and look remarkably happy about it the whole time.

We recover quickly, and feel relaxed as soon as we arrive... now to arrange some transport back to Bottle Beach...