We didn't get up as early as perhaps we should - Mikey was still fast asleep and since it's unusual to be awake first I didn't want to disturb him, but if we were going to have breakfast before we went out, he had to wake up. We took a taxi to the bus station, once again we were herded onto a bus that left the moment we boarded, and we spent three hours on the road to Kachanabouri. I made the mistake of catching someone's eye as the bus pulled into the station, and we were pounced on the moment we got off. We managed to avoid her, though, and went to a restaurant for a quick lunch. The menu was huge, the restaurant was weird (and had too many framed bugs on the wall) and only a few of the food items had English translations. One of them was stir-fried dried fish stomach. I didn't try it. We ordered normal things instead. I only felt a little bit aware that I'd seen no other white faces in the town and that it had been less than a week since the English couple was killed in town, but it was still a tiny bit uncomfortable. The food arrived. Two dishes were fine, but one was a series of lumps - brown and see-through, beige and chewy, yellow and crispy - all of which tasted of artificial bacon flavouring. It was too weird to eat much of, so we paid quickly and left. We allowed ourselves to be caught by a man claiming to have a taxi becaue we hadn't seen a taxi anywhere, and he ran us round the town - a war museum, the bridge, the cemetary - in his little customised pick-up truck, and waited while we took photos. Every now and then he tried to sell us accommodation but we declined and he carried on.

The JEATH museum in town was a bamboo hut, a replica of the shelter that the prisoners of war would have lived in, and there were photos and posters giving an idea of the terrible conditions that they lived in under the Japanese. Then we went out to the bridge which was really just a bridge over a river. It was much more impressive though, when I thought that over one hundred thousand people died to build the railway (known as the Death Railway) between Rangoon in Burma and Bangkok. We walked over the bridge, waited for a train to pass and then walked back. We stopped briefly at the cemetary that Thailand donated to honour the people who died on its soil, which was quite moving. Then back in the truck, back to the bus, and an express trip back to Bangkok. The most interesting thing on the way back was the incredible number of pomelos for sale. For about an eight-mile stretch of road there were hundreds and hundreds of stalls piled high with head-sized green citrus fruit. The smaller stalls would have shelves of about three hundred fruit, the larger ones had pyramids that must have totalled thousands. They were in buckets and baskets too, and there was often no more than a foot of space between the stalls. They sold nothing else, and I estimated that more than 150,000 fruit must have been on offer.

From the bus station we decided to try the night market in Chinatown despite the taxidriver telling us it closed at night. It certainly didn't, and Chinatown here, like everywhere else we'd been, was a glorious mix of food stalls and market goods. The traffic was mostly at a standstill and we walked in the street because the stalls took up the pavement. Traffic policemen blew whistles futilely and even stopped cars so that we could take photos. There were piles of durian fruit, embedded on sticks so that they could be carried, and these ones actually smelled slightly sweet and almost appetising under their sulphur and sewage stink. I bought pomelo segments and wandered round eating with a sharp stick. We walked the side streets, avoiding motorbikes and men wheeling trolleys piled high with fruit or boxes. It smelled of cooking meat and meths. A bit later we found what was once called the "Thieves' market" because of all the stolen goods on sale. There were piles of old shoes, some in pairs, tipped out onto blankets. Tarpaulins were littered with old car stereos, broken keyboards, computer game consoles and cables. Every stall seemed to sell two or more incongruous items: taps and tennis balls; spoons and pants; lightbulbs, belts and toy cars. There was nothing here we needed, though, and I think that so far Malaysia has the edge on markets. We went back to the hotel eventually, checked email and I stayed up until almost 1am trying to catch up on the diary entries!