If there's one piece of advice that echoes throughout every guidebook for backpackers, it's: "don't leave your passport with anyone." So you can imagine our fear when we found ourselves without ours during what seemed to be a rather sticky border crossing from Thailand to Malaysia. As we transferred to a pontoon in the middle of the sea off Koh Lipe island (where we were to board our final speedboat to Langkawi), a strange Thai man insisted he would sort out o...

Our final day in Thailand has arrived. After scoffing as much as we could at the resort for breakfast, we've just boarded a nine hour ferry down the West coast of Thailand, to Langkawi, Malaysia. Only this is Thailand, so it's not as simple as that. First the tide was out, so together with our backpacks we were loaded on the back of a tractor on the beach out to the longtail boat, which took us out to a ferry. From here we travelled back to Tonsai Village to ca...

As the train rolled in to Surat Thani we were two hours late, but we thought there'd be plenty of time to catch the regular three hour bus on to Krabi where we could then pick up a ferry to our paradise island for the next few days: Koh Phi Phi. As instructed by our guidebook, we ignored all the travel agencies that hassled us to get on their tourist buses and headed down the road for the local Government bus. As usual for the Lonely Planet, the directions didn...

Ahh Thailand, why can't we make sense of your bus stations? We arrived in the main station in Bangkok with instructions for taking a metro from there to the centre of the city, but after 30 minutes of walking around narrow alleyways lined with market stalls, the metro station was nowhere to be seen and we found ourselves on board a rickety old local bus with a conductor who could barely speak English, and just smiled and said "yes, yes" when we said we wanted ...

Hurrah! We made it! Turns out we could buy a ticket for Ayutthaya at the station, so after filling up at a 7 11 store (beautifully air conditioned, these supermarkets have been our saviour in Thailand) we settled in to rather plush, fully recline-able seats and relaxed knowing that the unplanned detour should work out fine. That was until after five hours the conductor told us we'd reached our stop, so we clambered out with our bags, only realising just as the ...