I shared a taxi from the station to Khao San Road with a pom who'd lived in Sydney for 10 years, he was off to Osaka, lucky sod. At Khao San road I headed for one of the Sawasdee chain of hotels and asked for directions for another of them. A nice chappy showed me the way and I booked in for the night.

I hit the net and changed my IF account password and to see where Tina and Darryl would meet me, unfortunately they were still in Ayutthaya so I'm on my own for the match. I went to phone home to get the rest of my bank info. I got some of the info, but still couldn't get to my other two accounts. One I can check through an ATM, the other I can phone, so I'm not too worried.

I had two and a half hours before kick off of the England Wales match so I decided to go to a place that would be showing it and have some food. A Thai girl sat next to me and the first thing out of her mouth was 'Are you married?' from then on I knew I was in trouble. I told her I was engaged but that my fiance wasn't travelling with me, her reply was 'That don't matter.' we chatted for 20 minutes with her saying is was 'nice' (I hate that word!) before I was able to get away with vague promises to sit with her during the match. I left the pub.

I went to the Irish pub, they would have the match on as the Irish match was a late kick-off, I got a beer and a good seat. 15 minutes before kick-off the band starts playing so I leave again. Every bar had the match on but was still playing booming music. So I headed to the first pub again as they were very much up for the game (all the staff had england of makeshift wales shirts on). It was standing room only. I got talking to the Kiwi I was stood beside. Even though everyone was shoulder to shoulder the bar staff still got around with drinks.

The match was excellent!

After the mach me and the Kiwi headed to the silk bar. His name was Dave and he'd arrived the day before and he wanted to travel to Laos, through Vietnam, and on through Cambodia. It was near enough what I wanted to do and sounded good so we decided to do it together. It would mean heading back up to Chiang Mai.