I still have not managed to process all of the mail. Specifically, the financial paperwork is just sitting there waiting for me. This seems to have made up about two-thirds of all the mail...the rest being junk mail, subscriptions reminders and a few Christmas cards.

The job hunt has been in full swing since stepping off the plane, and we have had lots of snow. Yuck. Another reason to spend my days diving off Krabi.

After dinner it was time for me to head for the airport and I caught the A21 bus for HKD36. It was a double-decker and I scored the top front right bench. It was only then that the “I am leaving� feeling set it. It was mildly surreal. Once arriving at the airport with plenty of time to spare for my Swiss International Airlines 00:05AM flight LX139, I headed for the business class check-in desk. On presenting my upgraded economy ticket, the check-in clerk informs me that my ticket is for yesterday’s flight. Because I had changed the flight after buying the tickets, they put a little sticker on the ticket and did not issue a new ticket. So the ticket was a little bit ambiguous and I misread it. Stunned, I asked her what was going to happen next. First she said I had to pay a rebooking fee and then “Well, the flight is pretty full so we probably you probably will have an economy seat.� I took my glasses off, stared at my passport and sunk into a deep depression. This is costing me money, I’ve lost the business class upgrade, and might not even be able to reclaim the miles spent on it. I put my Travel Club Gold card down on the check in desk and asked her to do her best. She went over to the manager and told me that I was on the flight and on priority standby for a business class seat. I thanked her and headed for immigration and the terminal.

I was pretty much convinced cattle-class was my fate for the 13-hour flight. Twice I asked at the check in desk how things looked and they informed me that they were reorganizing the now full flight and that we would know once the passengers actually boarded the aircraft. Thirty minutes later when boarding began, the attendant put my boarding pass into one of those little ticket machines, but it spit my ticket back out and she gave me a new boarding pass—seat 4k. Business class, baby! I nearly did an American football touchdown dance on the spot.

The flight was pretty comfortable and I slept a good eight hours, read some, and watched a movie about an intern doctor in a San Francisco hospital (Reece Witherspoon) who was in a coma because of a car accident. Total “chick flick� but I was really into it and actually teared up and sniffed a bunch. Nobody seemed to notice in the noisy, dark aircraft thankfully.

The newish Airbus 340-300 landed about 6AM, I breezed through immigration and customs and was met by my friend Nina who’s been watering my plants. Very nice of her. Once home I jumped straight into my initial day back in town. First things first: grocery shopping. Second, register with the Swiss unemployment bureau (RAV). Third, start the process of going through five months of paperwork. Ouch. Fourth, make some calls and write some emails to meet up with my Zürich friends.

I am home now, although it doesn’t feel like home as it did before leaving. There are lots of little story snippets that will make the blog in the coming weeks, post mortem analysis of my trip, etc. So keep on visiting for a while.

Quickly I checked into room 1430, ripped into my pack to find some clean clothing, turned on the television and drew a bath with bubbles and all. Time to unwind. After about three minutes in the tub I heard someone enter the room through the front door—I freaked out and yelled “who is it???� “House keeping� was the reply. “I’m taking a bath, not now� was my agitated response. “But may I come in?� the housekeeper pushed. That is when my weakened patience lost it and my vicious retort was “No! Just get out!!!� That did the trick, but by then I was livid.

So, I called the guest services number on extension 10 to complain, explaining that I had just checked in, there was no reason for housekeeping to be popping in, especially without using the door bell, and that I just wanted to relax in my bath. The lady on the other end said she would look into the problem and rectify it. Quickly, because I’m getting the chills standing there naked in my room talking on the phone, I jump back into my nice, hot bath.

Ten minutes later there is a knock at the door, which rudely disturbs my recently regained relaxed body.

“Who is it???�
“Room service.�
“GO AWAY!!!�
“We have a complimentary food tray for you, sorry to disturbed you.�
(I’m looking through the peep hole now.)
“GO AWAY! I am trying to take a bath!!!�

I’m really furious at this point and call the guest services line again. The woman professes many apologies and blamed the disturbance on language issues and that the house keeper did not know that I was taking a bath. Bull shit, is my initial though.

So, for the third time in twenty minutes I hope back into the bath and find myself heating up the now lukewarm water. Ahhh…

OK, an hour later I’m relaxed and refreshed and clean like I haven’t been in months. I feel good. Time for some Internet—but it’s not working. I call up the service desk who promises a technician in the next hour or so, but I start messing about with it and discover that both of the two Ethernet cables has the little clip broken off. These cables are cheap, 25cm kind of things and there is no excuse for this in my professional opinion. Bloody hell, the room is running nearly US$230 a night! My expectations were higher.

The next day, after my blood was stopped boiling, I contact the Director of Guest Services, Peter Cheng, and detailed list my complaints as concisely as I could. He promises to look into events and get back to me. Later that day he invites me to breakfast the next morning and “comped� me a late check out and the previous morning’s breakfast. (A good $150 worth of food and services.) When we met on the 24 floor ‘Club Level’ we talk about the network cables—there is just no excuse and he realized it (or at least told me so.) As for the room service foul-ups it comes down to communication problems and language misunderstandings. I can understand that but it certainly got my knickers in a twist at the time.

I spent most of my three days in Hong Kong working on the blog and picture gallery. The view outside my hotel room was not so impressive, but the four cheese penne pasta that room service delivered was. Unfortunately, it was too cold to hang out by the pool or I would have just read books, cooled off in the pool, and

After waking up the next morning I pack my bags, hop onto the ferry/heliport terminal shuttle bus where I buy a 1800 Patacas (US$235) helicopter ticket to Hong Kong—flight EA115 at 1pm on one HeliExpress’s Sikorsky S76C+ twin-engine, 12-seat helicopters—tail number B-MHH. While in line to buy the ticket I met Blake, an American guy involved in the construction of one of Macau’s newest hotel and casino, The Venetian which is due to open in 2007. (He is guy in the black and yellow striped shirt in the picture.)

After only ten minutes in the departure lounge about six of us are ushered out in order to the waiting aircraft which is already running. A short taxi to the landing spot, about 25m, and we are off! Lucky me, my seat was just behind the copilot and my view was pretty good. We flew over bridges, ferries in transit and lots of little islands. Check out the HeliExpress flight from Macau to Hong Kong photo gallery for the 36 photographs that I took.

After only fifteen minutes we approach Hong Kong Island and land near Sheung Wan station. We disembark the still running helicopter, are guided down the stairs and some guy carries my 16 kilo pack down for me. We cleared immigration and customs in record time…it must have been three minutes maximum for the entire thing. Quick, easy, exhilarating and a complete blast. But, damn, that was expensive.

After looking about the two floors of the casino for half an hour I head back for my room and crash for the night. They games are just different than what you would see in Vegas and that intimidated me. I’m not really a gambling kind of guy anyway.

The next day I woke up, grabbed a map from the hotel and set out with my camera. The first areas on interest were some of the local parks, like the Comendador Ho Yin Garden…which is now a hotel construction site. Fact is, Macau is just booming with construction. It is crazy. So next I head for the shoreline to the south where I check out Alameda Dr. Carlos D’Assumpçao park which was still intact. At the part there were these funny little animal things here and there that was just plain…well…Chinese in nature. The park lead me to the sea and the Status of the Kum Lam and Ecumenical Center. Nothing to exciting, so I head east towards the art museum which was very deserted.

Near the art museum there was a horse racing track done manufactured to look like ancient Greece with volcanoes and all. It was a real Vegas like thing to see. The Sands is located there also along with the ferry and helicopter terminals. Currently, The Sands is undergoing an expansion which eats away a little bit more park space. So far, I’m not impressed and was thinking Macau was a mistake. I’ve got this thing for cemeteries and pictures of tombstones so I trek my way to the St. Micheal cemetery on Est. do Cementerio. It was really interesting and I can’t wait to add the pictures to my tombstone gallery. The tombstones varied more than any other cemetery I’ve been to and was an odd mix of Christian and Buddhist traditions and in three different languages: Chinese, Portuguese, and English. Some of the graves were as old as the early 1800s.

This put me in the area of Monte Fort which was packed with tourists. Regardless, I made my way up top where the fortress has an amazing view of the city. A few photographs later I head down to the adjacent Ruins of Saint Paul’s cathedral which is just basically the front façade—very popular with the picture taking tourists. This lead me down towards the ritzy shopping area and city hall, known locally as The Institute of Civic and Municipal Affairs.

These last few kilometers of walking have definitely shown me the more attractive, architecturally interesting parts of Macau. But the Chinese zest for the new glass and steel future is very evident. My feet are still hurting from my walking about in Kuala Lumpur with knackered flip flops so I head back for the hotel for a nap, some television and photo processing. That evening I head back into the Pharoah Casino and proceed to blow through 700 Macau Patacas within an hour and so give up and end the evening at the hotel trying to finish off No Logo.

Waking up at 10am was good, rather than sleeping all day. My time in KL was limited to just 30-some hours, so I quickly set upon a walkabout of town. First stop was Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC) where the Petronas Towers are located. These pair of buildings are one of my most favorite illustrations of modern architecture at its best.

At 1483 feet (452m) tall, the tallest building in the world at the date of its completion [1998], measured to the highest point. However, the Sears Tower in Chicago still has the highest occupied building floor, more than 200 feet higher than the highest occupied floor of the Petronas Towers. -- www.greatbuildings.com

There I roamed around inside the shopping mall, had lunch (Caesar salad and veggie pizza) and took some photos. Apparently you are not supposed to take photos as I discovered after lunch. When taking this picture of the ‘no pictures’ sign a Malaysian woman approached me and we spoke for a while. Very friendly—offered to take me out to dinner with her sister (who was going to university in Zurich) and grandmother.

Later I walked down to the Indian district for some photographs, then Medeka Square which in the heart of the old Colonial District. There was even this old establishment placed called the Royal Selangor Club where the British used to toss back gin and tonics, run their empire and other old school stuff. I snuck up and took a picture…half expecting to be intercepted and arrested. There were lots of interesting bits of architecture around that are up in the photo gallery now.

My few hours of walking around in failing flip flops started to take their toll on my feet, so I headed back for the hotel, slept, ate, and slept again until the next morning. I checked out about noon and took a 75 Ringgit “Taksi� to the Kuala Lumpur International airport for my 115 Ringgit flight to Macau on Air Asia’s 15:20 AK52, a barebones Boeing 737-300.

It is about 10pm when we arrive at the travel agency in Georgetown where I wait for over an hour. At about 11:15pm a big, VIP bus pulls up and I plop down into seat 3A. Soon we are on the road, and I’m fast asleep. Our arrival was at a painful 4:45am in Kuala Lumpur. Ouch.

Hold on to your mouse kids, there is more to come.

We suit up and jump in the water with the other dozen or so divers. After descending to some 18m we encounter the 1997 wreck we begin to circumnavigate the 85m long ferry clockwise. It is starting to collapse but a few brave divers pop inside for a quick peak. That kind activity is way out of the scope of our dive so we continue on checking out the wreck. Besides the aquatic life, like eels and scorpion fish, we came across the caved in roof of the ferry’s latrine with porcelain toilets very much intact in comparison to the remainder of the vessel. Our dive took us as went as deep as 24m which limited our time and we had to surface after 37 minutes.

After surfacing, unsuiting, drinking some orange Gatorade-like drink and some 75 minutes later Johannes and I were back in the water at Anemone Reef. There he took me on Underwater Naturalist Adventure Dive, along with a big, blonde Ozzie who was also working on his Advanced Open Water certification. His situation was sorta funny because he was actually in Krabi on his honeymoon, but his wife was up in Bangkok visiting relatives and shopping. (Her parents are Thai.) Some honeymoon! Anyway, our big goal for the dive is to circumnavigate a reef (clockwise again) and take notes on five different aquatic life forms. I really grooved on this and took detailed notes on seven different things with an effort to be diverse: coral, plants and fish. It turns out what I thought were plants, some sea fans, are actual a form of coral. Learn something new every day. After 43 minutes at depths up to 22m we surface again, unsuit and it’s lunch time.

While eating lunch, along with the other few diving boats from the local area, a shout from the Phi Phi Scuba vessel asked if we had any cigarettes, even offering to pay for them. Two minutes later a beautiful blonde women was swimming over to our boat declaring, and this is a direct quote, “I am not desperate, just drunk�. We all had a good laugh out of it and she made off with a few fags to hold her over. Junkies, the lot of them.

After an hour and forty some minutes we arrive, get our gear on again and dive onto Shark Point for the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy Adventure Course. We had to do silly things like hold our fins and levitate like a Jedi Master, swim around and then over another diver, approach them from the back, float over then and then come down head first until we were looking at their crotch. A seemingly more important exercise consisted of an instructor handing up a 0.8kg dive belt weight and we had to hold our current depth without using our BCD. I’m pleased to say that I did fairly well at most of these assignments. My fellow Ozzie diver had much more difficulty but we discussed it top side and we he seemed to be overcompensating on both downwards and upwards movements and depending on his BDC too much. After 45 minutes underwater we surfaced for the last time, debriefed, ate some fresh watermelon and pineapple, and headed back in for the two hour journey to Ao Nang.

Knowing now to behave myself, once we reached shore I had a quick dinner with Terje again, did some internet junky stuff, and hit the sake early—tomorrows dive was starting an hour early and we needed to be at the dive center at 6:45am. Ouch!

Once we finished our now routine dive center-to-dive boat transfer we were off an and extra long three hour voyage to Koh Haa Yai. There we had two pairs of Advanced Course: Deep Diver students, the Ozzie and myself. Before the dive we had two complete two silly exercises. The first was to spell our name backwards and the second to pick out numbers from a 4x4 grid with the squares numbered from 1 to 16. Our instructor timed our results so that we could compare with our times down deep when we would should be under the increasing (as the deeper you get) effects of nitrogen narcosis. We kept separate for the initial exercises, which turned out to very interesting: I was faster at the exercises at 29m than I was shipside. When Johannes wrote the results on his slate a laughed through my regulator so hard is was audible to everyone around us. Too funny.

After that the Ozzy’s instructor had some eggs with him which he broke open and we played with the yolk. It was interesting because it the pressure condensed it so much that you could push on it and your finger indentation would stay in it until manipulated later. The fish were also interested and we had to keep ushering them away. Afterwards we slowly ascended until we were ready to surface

Now that I think about it, before we descended to depth we also went through some caves at Koh Haa Yai. One could look up and see the surface of the water, but it was not exposed to the open atmosphere, which was really cool. At one point it got a little narrow and my fins kicked the sides, but other than that all was cool.

After ascending and boarding the dive boat we spend nearly two hours moving onto the next dive site, Koh Hoa Lagoon. There we were to complete my most dreaded Advanced Course, the underwater navigation dive. This stems from my follies in Marbella, Spain where I completed my initial Open Water certification and really disliked the underwater navigation exercise. Anyway, things went OK. There was this one area where we started out every maneuver where locally known porcupine fish hangs out. I forget his name, but it is something like "Perky". He is like a cat that demand attention and wants people to rub his underside…so much so that he gets in the way of what we are trying to accomplish.

Anyway, we complete the four navigation tasks and then head off to check out some rare aquatic life that Johannes is really excited about. They were interesting, but I can’t exactly put to words what they looked like.

We surface, board, head back for Ao Nang on the three hour trip and everyone relaxes…eating fruit, sleeping on the foredeck of the boat, a beer or two, and chatting. Very relaxing. Once we get to shore we all head back for the dive center where Johannes and I filled out the log book and paperwork for my official PADI Advanced Open Water certification. Oh, yea, I also had to drop over 13,000 Baht on the old UBS MasterCard.

I must have made it into Patong Beach, the most popular and seedy part of Phuket Island, at about 11:30am. Once I became orientated I parked my blue scooter along the beach and headed for the water to cool off. Patong Beach is so much like the south coast of Spain or France that it is frightening—packed in beach chairs, topless women of all ages, and enough trinket vendors to drive the most tolerant person mad.

It was interesting to see the damage and recovery of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. Many hotels and beach front infrastructure were either fully fixed up or under construction. But there were a disturbing number of buildings fenced off and clearly nothing having been done to fix them up since that horrible day.

Around noon I realized that there was some sort of festival/parade going on and walked around randomly until it was clear what the route was. It turns out to be the Gay Pride Parade for Phuket and is centered on that famous seedy road and the main beach road, Thanon Thavee Wong. It was a great opportunity for people picture taking and soon I should have plenty of interesting photographs up in the gallery. This is the second Gay Pride Parade I’ve witnessed in the past six months, the other being in Reykjavík, Iceland last September. The contrasts were interesting: Patong participants were generally male and dressed up in drag, while in Reykjavík there were many more lesbians and less men dressed as women. In Reykjavík it was basically a local and family affair with lots of kids, families and a generally good feeling about it. “Gay for a day�, is how Clement of www.ontheruntur.com described it. (You can also checkout my entry about the parade on www.runtur.com) The Patong parade seemed very commercialized—may of the floats and parade participants were employees of bars and discothèques dressed in commercially uniform outfits. Some where even handing out flyers to come join in the after parties, naturally held at the bars themselves. In Reykjavík it was much more of a civic affair.

A funny thing was that the Katoey community seemed to be left out too, along with the lesbians. (Maybe there aren’t that many Lesbians in Thailand…I do not really know.) But a group of about seven or eight rebellious, flamboyant, seductively dressed Katoey were roaming around half disturbing the parade. The officials did not seem to happy about it. The crowd loved it as they posed for pictures with all the tourists hanging out on the street. All in all, it was very entertaining.

About 5pm I realized that I needed to start heading back for Krabi. Unfortunately, I got lost on the Island of Phuket and ended up east of Phuket Town, which delayed me nearly an hour. Once the sun set and the bug came out, I had to slow down because I was now not wearing any eye protection. Then it started to get a little bit chilly for my shorts-n-T-shirt attire. And finally I missed some of the side roads off to Ao Nang and ended up in Krabi Town central…all of this costing me another hour. Once back in Ao Nang at about 10pm I bumped into Terje while tracking down some dinner.

Whew, what a day.

The next morning I met the Ao Nang Diving staff at their headquarters on the premises of Krabi Sea View Resort on route 4203 the Ao Nang high street at 7:45am. After loading up the truck with our gear and food for the day we headed the kilometer or so down to the beach and moved everything off onto a long boat. The long boat then took us out another kilometer to see where we transferred everything to the 25m, 2.5 deck M/v Petchmanee dive boat and set out on a two hour cruise to the island Koh Bida Nok.

After suiting up with my dive master, Kirre from Norway, and a beautiful young Swedish woman’s name who escapes me, we spent 57 minutes at Koh Bida Nok. It was fantastic…I have nto been diving for over two years since my Christmas holiday on San Salvador in The Bahamas with Steve, Charlotte and her parents. It was like riding a bicycle.

After about fifty minutes for lunch and the cruise to our new dive site, The Pinnade at Koh Yun, we jumped back in for our second 61 minute dive. While the visibility was not as stunning as San Salvador, both dives were incredibly amazing and lots of fun. On the two hour ride back to Ao Nang I grabbed myself a 70 Baht Chang Beer that as for sale, slipped into the rear corner of the top deck and relaxed.

Once back on shore I met Terje for the first time in Thailand. We went out for dinner, had some drinks, and played some pool with two young kids from America and two young ladies who claimed to be from Jersey…but Essex seemed more likely in my mind. Anyway, after only five beers or so I was completely pissed and went into the trademark Steve-Owens-walk-away-without-saying-a-word crash mode. Heading straight for the guesthouse, I accidentally stiffed Terje with my 700 Baht bar bill. (It was an Irish bar and the Guinness in a can was a whopping 250 Baht a pop which we discovered on the second round.)

Apparently, diving and drinking afterwards are not so compatible and it really messed me up. The next morning I missed the dive boat by ten minutes, but that is probably a good thing considering how poorly I was feeling.

Other than that, I hit the Bumrangdi Hospital for some cosmetic stuff (penis reduction, etc.) and spent many hours down at the hotel pool. The swimming and sunbathing area was much more relaxed. They guys running the area knew that I liked two towels, to sit in the water reading at the shallow end, and that my Singha beers should be served in buckets full of ice. No silly taxes, either.

I did pop out onto Sumkhumvit Road to take some pictures (not too exciting) and buy four dodgy Video CDs that I might like but probably will not. Video CDs from this region are generally of poor quality, frequently subtitled in Chinese, Thai or whatever, and sometimes don’t even play all the way through. The titles include Underworld: Evolution, War of the World (the Scientologist version), Fantastic Four, and Doom all at 100 Baht each. Screw the MPAA.

One big mistake was not arranging transportation down to Krabi in southern Thailand well in advance, which kept me in Bangkok a full four days. In the end I had to settle for an 800 Baht overnight private minibus service, which to date had been avoided. There are many horror stories about getting ripped off, uncomfortable seating, overbooking, wrong destinations, and remote drop off points with extortionist taxi drivers waiting in lay. I caught my first of three busses at the hotel—a 10 passenger poorly air-conditioned minivan that drove us around central Bangkok for over two hours picking people up. (Actually, I was the third to last person so others must have suffered more.) At about 6:30pm they drop us off at a centralized, private bus station where they split us up into destinations. About an hour later many of us board a monster double-decker 60pax bus that is actually fairly comfortable. I sat up front top side on the left isle seat beside an Irish woman whose name eludes me. Our bus was delayed while there drunken Irish-folk (two guys and gal) argued incoherently with the drivers for a good thirty minutes. In the end they boarded the bus. The Irish woman, who was on a year long RTW trip spoke about various topic until about 11pm when we finally fell asleep.

Side note: The Irish women used to live outside of Cologne, Germany which I’ve been to many times including Jon and Jen’s wedding in the spring of 2002. My good friend Dave and I went up to that festive occasion via first class train carriages. It’s a long haul and Dave got totally inebriated—to the point that he was only semi-lucid and knocked over a beer onto the two passengers in the cabin with us. They had been politely ignoring us up until then, but after my profound apology (Dave was completely unaware of the drama) one of the fellow passengers asked “So, I guess I have the right to ask: Are your Irish?� I recited this story to my new Irish travel mate and she actually thought it was funny. :D

Anyway, at about 1230am we pulled into a soup kitchen, probably owned by the driver’s family, for food. One of the drunken Irishmen hopped out, puked his guts and then passed out on the ground until we were ready to leave. At about six in the morning we pulled into Surat Tani where we again awaited new busses to take us to new destinations—Krabi for me, Koh Samui for my new Irish friend, Ranong for this other Australian guy, etc. After an hour of sleepily pacing about the station, an older former 40pax government bus pulled and several of us jumped onto it. Soon I was fast asleep and was surprised to find myself in Krabi at 9:30am. (The lady who sold me the ticket said I would arrive about 3pm.) So I quickly grabbed a 150 Baht motorbike driver and was off for Ao Nang (aka Ao Phra Nang) Beach that, according to my Rough Guide to Thailand, is the diving hub of Krabi.

After about thirty minutes of wandering around fully packed I settled into room Bream Guesthouse the 300 Baht per night. I’ve got a fairly clean room about 50 meters from the beach with shared facilities. (Cold shower, but it’s 30C, so whatever.)

I have arrived. Sun, beaches and diving are on the agenda. Also somewhat excitingly the Norwegian Terje who I met in Sam Neua, Laos is in the region and we will probably meet up. Life is good.

Friday morning started out at the beach very early, went for a swim, had a quick breakfast at Le Rouse, said good bye to the staff, checked out of my hotel, hopped on a $1 motorbike ride to the bus station and grabbed a 11:30am decrebide TSG bus for US$4 to Phnom Penh. I had a window seat in the second to last row and two Cambodia teenagers were trying to squeeze both of them into the one seat beside me. At first I thought they’d wait until the bus got moving and then spread out to other seat or the floor, but after being crammed up against the two of them when we were moving I forcefully but politely said “one of you will have to sit on the floor�. I don’t think it was the language they understood, but my tone of voice and pointing certainly did the trick.

Some four hours later we arrived in the capital and a motorbike driver took me back to the Dara Reang Sey Hotel for US$1. My moto-driver agreed to take me to the airport the next morning for US$3. It seems that once I become comfortable with a city I start taking the riskier transport options, bargaining a bit harder, etc. Soon I checked into a lower end US$7 room on the top floor with only a fan and tiny TV. My favorite room number again, 404.

Next I headed down to a restraurant on the Tonle Sap River. There I had a fantastic grilled cheese sandwich, a few lattes, a few beers, and bought the latest copies of the Economist and International Herald Tribune from the disabled teenage vendor who remembered me from the week earlier. There was a eight year old girl selling trinkets, but I don’t buy into that child labor thing and stayed away. It being somewhat of a low season she was just hopping around from table to table chatting and playing. I gave her my last week’s Economist which she subsequently sold for US$2 and even offered to split the profit with me. Her name Ling and I certainly hope her life improves.

The Cambodian owner/hostess of the bar was a bit of a cold fish, but strikingly beautiful. She let me take a picture of her but other than that wanted me to buy her or some of her waitresses drinks. Apparently the restraint is half hostess bar, although you could not tell that from the generic tourist cliental. (“Hostess� as in buy me a drink and I’ll talk to you…no motorbike driver “boom, boom� stuff here.)

At about 11pm I hit the sack, woke up just in time to meet my waiting motor bike driver downstairs and was off to the airport. We arrived in plenty of time for my to catch my Bangkok Airways PG921 flight on a well maintained Airbus A-320. They even had a little lobby lounge where I filled up on free cakes, coffee and internet. Fantastic. An eventless hour and fifteen minutes later I was back in Bangkok.