The minibus picked us up at 8am and bounced its way to Georgetown where it collected a number of other people. There seemed to be something wrong with its suspension as even crossing the painted white lines in the road jolted it into spasms of bumps that lasted for minutes. And although I've warned Mikey not to look, he insists on watching the driver, which made him nervous for the whole trip. At about 11 we stopped for lunch and to get visas, and there was nothing I fancied to eat (salty fish and fish heads didn't do too much for my appetite) so we bought chocolate. And then we were back on the bus, bumping along until we finally reached the end of Malaysia and the beginning of Thailand.

We had diligently filled out the exit cards given to us in Singapore, all three pages, but no-one asked for them. At least we got a Malaysian stamp - I'd've had to've asked for one otherwise. The bus took us to the Thai border and we did immigration things there. They'd stapled the visa into our passports - as bad as the Americans, that. There didn't seem to be any customs offices so we climbed back into the van and drove for another couple of hours. At Hat Yai we stopped and the driver got us all out to wait in a cafe. We knew we'd have to change vans and that we'd have a bit of a wait. The man said that the new bus would be along at 1, which was only 20 minutes away, so Mikey took the opportunity to get some baht and I sat with the bags. At 1.20 we had another thought (it does happen...): Thailand was in another time zone - it was only 12.20 now, so we had enough time to find something to eat if we wanted. I did a cursory wander, and discovered that only about 3% of the signs were in English, the rest in the curly Thai script that's pretty, but not as pretty as Tamil. And, of course, there are about three versions of it, perhaps a bit like Hebrew where you have print and script - one's for handwriting, the other is the eqivalent of block capitals or newsprint. Which didn't help. I have a feeling that some of the Thai script has been modified or stylised in some way, so there was a whole uninteligible world out there that I'd just have to guess at. I didn't find anything to eat that I could be sure didn't have fish in it: it all smelled like it might, so I went back to Mikey and we ate a packet of polo mints.

At about 1.30 a new bus turned up. Actually, it was the bus that had been sitting outside the cafe all afternoon, but it did a quick trip round the block and came back to let us in. There were now four of us and it would have been hard enough without our bags - the three rows of seats were so tightly squished together that there was not enough leg room even for me. The driver packed us all in, intent on getting all the luggage in the boot even though I thought my rucksack alone would take up all the room (it didn't, strangely enough) and then we drove around town picking up more people. It was very cramped and very hot and bumpy, but I had my book and the countryside was quite remarkable - I saw my first paddy fields and people up to knees or waists in water, and a tractor with half its large wheels submerged trundling through the wet. At times, huge chunks of mountain had been dropped onto the horizon, just massive fragments of rock with hairy tree coverings and bare pink sides, the ground leading up to the distance filled with wet squares of rice and wading old women in hats. It was beautiful.

There were a couple of nasty accidents on the sides of the road; one, a truck whose roof had collapsed until it reached the steering wheel suggested that no-one had survived it. Our van stopped to help a stranded minibus change its flat tyre. We were in jungle country now, where the trees and undergrowth had been cleared just enough to build small houses along the side of the road. Most of these were a single room wide, but had been extended backwards, as money allowed, until they were eight or nine rooms deep, all with a slightly lower roofline than the older parts of the house. Roadsigns were all in Thai, so we didn't know where we were heading or how close we were. It poured with rain a few times and then stopped again. We paused at a service station and I saw that we were still 100 miles from our destination.

About two hours after that, we arrived in the town of Krabi. It was really just a long street with stalls and mopeds along it, until the buildings became a little more substantial in the town centre. The minibus dropped us right outside a restaurant with an internet cafe, and it felt good to have movement in my arms and legs again. I looked at a couple of places to stay on the computer, and found one on the main road. But it was hot and late, and we were tired, so I asked the cafe owners if they had rooms and I was shown one upstairs. Although it had no windows, it was clean, which was important, and cost a pound for the two of us, so we moved in. It was painted in dark blue gloss and had a fan that really just stirred the air, which smelled of joss-sticks. We found out the Thai words for thank you, which are different for me and Mikey and hard to remember because Thai is a tonal language, but whenever we tried the hostel ladies smiled and corrected us, so it was all very friendly.

We had supper there, Mikey sat and watched half of Pirates of the Carribean and laughed out loud at the bit where Jack Sparrow said, 'Obviously you've never been to Singapore' and I answered a dozen emails. Then we went into town and tried to find a phonecard to wish Mikey's dad a happy birthday.

I know a lot of wise people, and one of them said, just recently in a conversation about foreign food that it's a case of 'Four legs good, more legs bad,' which I have to agree with. However I need to add that no legs is bad also, it just isn't quite so succinct. Here were street stalls selling fried locusts and maggots and what looked like chrysalises. We walked by quickly and pretended that we hadn't seen them.

Our phonecard search became a treasure hunt where every shop gave us a new clue, and we finally tracked on down and spent ages unable to get through to Ralph's mobile. I asked Mikey repeatedly if he had the right number, which he claimed he did, until 20 minutes later he decided to swap a three for a six and got through with no problem. I mocked him for a while, but only as much as he deserved.

Back at the hostel we booked a boat to Ko Phi Phi island in the morning, and somewhere to stay there, and went to sleep. There was no top sheet on the bed, but we didn't need it - my alarm clock told me it was 33 degrees (just over 90 for you older people) in the room. I still managed to sleep quite well though.