Back once again to The Smoke, as we affectionately don't call Bangkok. It's been great to get out of the heat and humidity of the city for the cool sea breezes of the Gulf of Thailand, but as it costs four times as much to get online down there as it does here, I'm afraid I decided to wait until getting back to Bangkok before updating my blog.

Early on Wednesday morning, Rachel, Chris and I took a flight with Thai budget airline Bangkok Airways to Ko Samui, in the Gulf of Thailand. From Samui airport - which, incidentally, might be the only airport in the world made entirely from wood - we took a ferry to the nearby island of Ko Pha Ngan, famous, or perhaps infamous, as the venue for the notorious full moon parties. This will be the southernmost point of our trip, as well as the lowest in altitude.

Hat Rin, the main resort on Ko Pha Ngan, where we stayed for two nights, is an odd sort of place. With far more backpackers - most of them British - than Thais, and almost nobody over 30, it feels like a bizarre postmodern outpost of the British empire. Fish and chips has supplanted pad thai as the staple diet. The town - really no more than a few streets - is wedged onto a narrow promontory between Sunrise Beach, the setting for the full moon parties, and Sunset Beach. Had the tsunami struck here, the entire town would easily have been washed from one into the other.

We broke the long journey between Ko Pha Ngan and Bangkok on Ko Tao, a smaller island north of Ko Pha Ngan, and one of Thailand's main diving centres. Unfortunately we didn't have time to dive, although Chris did snorkel, and enthused about swimming with the fish. On Ko Tao we stayed at a brand new resort, opened less than a month ago, which looks as if it has ambitions to be a luxury resort, although being almost the only guests, we didn't pay anything like luxury prices. It was only accessible by sea (on the way back the owner gave us a lift back to the ferry pier in his speedboat) so there wasn't a great deal to do there, but it felt good to relax on the verandah of our bungalow overlooking the sea. On balance, I much preferred Ko Tao to Ko Pha Ngan, although I'm glad I visited more than one island.

We arrived in Bangkok early this morning after a smooth ferry ride across the mirror-flat Gulf of Thailand - with flying fish taking flight like big fat silvery dragonflies as our boat approached - from Ko Tao to Chumphon on the mainland, and a rickety overnight train from there to Bangkok's Hualampong station. Today, we've seen several facets of the city, and I feel more confident that I like it. This morning, we visited the Grand Palace, the official (although not the actual) residence of Thailand's royal family, and repository of the Emerald Buddha, a jade Buddha statue which has become a symbol of Thai statehood.

From Bangkok's past, we took a bus through the permanent traffic jam that is the city's streets to Bangkok's future - the shiny, air-conditioned, soulless shopping malls of Siam Square, Thailand's equivalent of Piccadilly Circus. And after the world of Benetton and Starbucks we saw a different interpretation of capitalism in Chinatown. It was dark when we arrived, and the streets were full of stalls selling giant-sized prawn crackers, clams, dried squid and dried mushrooms. At a street stall we ate a bowl of noodle soup with pork, which turned out, to our great surprise, to have tentacles.