We were ready nice and early this morning, and we even went to the book exchange to swap a couple of books we'd finished. It had rained in big thunderstorms all night but the pavements were mostly dry by now, just a few puddles here and there. Most of the shops were open too, and one of them had motorbikes and a series of ancient, newly-painted printing presses in them, making wonderful clanking noises like mini trains. I watched them for a while and then we had toast at the hostel and asked the guy to call a taxi for the airport. Our flight was at 1pm, we didn't need to be there until 12, so we were in no real hurry. But the hostel guy took us himself in his minibus, and we rattled and bumped our way along for half an hour.

Phuket town has some pretty parts, and one of those is the street we were staying on. It was made up of houses (shops) all joined together, all once-white plaster, with their upstairs over-hanging their downstairs, causing a covered walkway all the way along, next to the pavement. Archways separated the properties, but you could see all the way along. Most of the upstairs parts had shutters with peeling paint and it looked rather nice. Our hostel went on forever - only a single shop wide, it had storey upon storey built on to it, with corridors and staircases tacked on at strange angles, false walls and ceilings everywhere, windows looking out onto walkways and all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies. From the roof all we could see was a jumble of other roofs, all corrugated tin or clear plastic, and there was no order to any of it. It was quite lovely.

As we drove out of town the pretty streets gave way to the highway and tin shacks and individual concrete block homes. Corrugated asbestos and iron were used more and more as building materials and sometimes the houses overlapped with one another. Everywhere we looked were giant, building-sized pictures of the Thai royal family, in gold frames and flood-lit. There were smaller ones on billboards, but virtually every house could see one. There were also hand-painted cinema posters around.

We reached the airport and checked in with no problem at all, and bought a sandwich for lunch - we only had an hour's flight so they probably wouldn't feed us. We were wrong. Within three minutes of taking off (in pretty purple and lilac seats with little lilac cushions) the incredibly efficient Thai Airways International staff (in lilac eyeshadow and a general purple theme) had given every single passenger a lunch box (another sandwich and fruit and juice and water) and tea, coffee or more juice. Then we landed in Bangkok and we managed to avoid the normal tourist crush at the luggage belt by standing back as large women in tight t-shirts pushed to the front with their trolleys and then, when they realised the conveyor belt was going the wrong way and they were no longer at the front they pushed through the crowd again.

Once we had our bags we went to find a taxi. Mikey had written the address of the hostel in his special only-for-himself handwriting, and without thinking about it ad handed over the paper. Which was passed around many people. Then a stocky Thai lady with a strangely deep voice and a slightly stubbly chin took us to another taxi desk. I didn't make the connection at all.

The taxi driver started off chattily enough and even changed the radio station to one with American music and British news for us. He looked at the address, and I wrote it out again. And then we took turn after turn and he asked every policeman he could find. We did U-turns and three-point turns and passed the same places four of five times. The radio was switched off and then re-tuned to a Thai station to signal the driver's displeasure, and he grunted a lot just in case we weren't aware he was unhappy. We finally got to the place, which was a hotel not a hostel and the driver muttered that he'd just spent two hours and drove away.

We were welcomed to the hotel by several ladies and a man with a trolley. They all did the lovely Thai gesture known as a 'wai' where you put your hands together, palms touching, and bring them up to your face while you bow your head, and we smiled in return, not sure how to respond. As soon as we were in the room we did some reseach and both our sources say that we should reply with a smile and a nod of the head - we don't return the wai of a waiter, shopkeeper, receptionist or child. Which is good to know.

After we'd unpacked a bit and Mikey had found a map and we'd checked our email, we went into Bangkok to see what we could see. We found the metro and the sky rail and navigated them successfully and, even though it was 8pm we managed to find a tailor and get some suits and shirts ordered for Mikey - he has to go back for a fitting tomorrow. Then we went to a shopping centre to look for doughnuts, and found them, too. As part of an energy conservation programme, the place closed at 9pm so we wandered up to the top floor to see if the cinema stayed open. And it did. We saw Man on Fire which was actually quite good despite being gruesome, and, thanks to a warning in Lonely Planet, we were ready to stand up and pay our respects to His Majesty the King while they played a little film about him and some uplifting music. The royal family is revered here and the King, the longest reigning monarch in the world, has spent his entire life making life better for the Thai people and they love him for it. That musical interlude over, we were ready to watch the film.

At midnight the metro stops running, so we took a taxi back. We even had the hotel map this time, but it still took 40 minutes, the directions of four security guards and three three-point turns. We did almost exactly the same route as earlier in the day.