I really don't think that getting up before eight is either nice or natural, unless you already happen to be awake. But it was another early morning for us, and an expected six to eight houts on the bus, taking us into Thailand. Mikey and Sokkha, the receptionist, had a few problems paying by credit card, but that got sorted when we turned the machine on, and then squeezed into a minibus for a while. We waited at the side of a road for a bus to turn up, and women with babies and men without limbs lined up to beg us for money. I remembered that we hadn't posted our postcards, and found out that the nearest postbox was a while away - by motorbike. I bravely decided to risk life and limb to make sure that the postcards were delivered and climbed on to the back of a bike. I held on for dear life with one hand and clutched the postcards with the other. It was actually a lot less scary than I thought it would be and by the time I got back I didn't even have to hold on. Very proud of myself.

A very old, dilapidated bus turned up and we had positioned ourselves at the front of the queue to get the front seats which always have more legroom. Unfortunately, this is where the bags were being stacked, so we sat in dusty, sandy seats with broken cushions and no legroom. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that the whole trip was about three hundred miles, and the shortest part of the trip would be in this bus.

It started out reasonably enough, heading out of town and west towards Thailand. An hour later we stopped at a cafe, which we thought signalled the proximity of the border. How wrong we were. All this cafe signified was the end of the paved road and the beginning of the long, dusty, remarkably uneven unpaved road that would take us another five hours to complete. In some cases there were dips in the surface about three or four feet deep, and the bus would either traverse them slowly or hurtle through the undergrowth on the other side of the road to avoid them. It was a long trip, made longer by the lack of air-conditioning, and we stopped at cafes every hour for about half an hour, prolonging the agony.

On the other hand, the scenery was gorgeous, and I think the vivid green of rice paddies is one of the most beautiful colours in the world, it tastes fresh and soft and slightly like yellow. And in each house we passed on the way, a miniature scene of rural life was unfolding: women were washing pans or chopping sugar cane and bamboo with machetes; young children were swimmig and washing in the water; men were often urinating at the side of the road, or driving pigs around on their motorbikes; girls walked the water buffalo into wet fields and boys helped their grandmothers to take herds of zen cows along the road, presumably to market.

A huge black cloud hung overhead, but never caught up with us. At our final stop we were told that it was only one hour to the border and that we wouldn't reach Bangkok until 7pm, a full six or so hours later than I was expecting. We resigned oursleves to a long day.

The border was an unfortunate mess of disorganised chaos, with women pulling large wooden carts with six or seven people on, pushing the front bar like oxen. We were offered lifts with our bags, which we declined as we didn't know where we were supposed to be going. We left Cambodia and had the staples removed from our passports (I thought only Americans had that awful habit) and entered Thailand where at least we could say 'hello' as well as 'thank you' and then walked a long, long way to another cafe to wait for our bus. Mikey joked about which would be ours, whenever a nice-looking coach came past, and I pointed to the open-sided truck with benches along its edges and said that we'd have six hours in that. After a pointless wait of forty minutes or so, the man in charge of such things pointed to the truck and we all piled in. I grinned at Mikey, but the man said it would only be for ten minutes or so. We have become unpolite in our bus etiquette, gladly pushing for the best seats, or, in this case, being sneaky and waiting until last, blocking the exit with our bags so that we can get on the next bus first. We've learned that if we don't do it, someone else will.

The truck was a pleasant, airy diversion for a while, and gave us all a chance to cool down. There was a large, air-conditioned coach waiting for us, and we were poised for the assault as the truck reached the car park, but we were told that we had half an hour to wait here. There is very little in the way of customer service here - the bus leaves when the driver has had his rice, and not before, even if all the paying passengers have already spent four hours in cafes and want to go. We piled up our bags and waited.

The skies opened in a torrential monsoon downpour, complete with lightning and the kind of thunder that rattles your teeth, which has become the normal sort, recently. We raced out to collect the bags and dragged them into the cafe. Once this was done the driver told us we could drag them out and onto the bus if we wanted, but he'd be staying there with his rice for a while yet. We all got comfy on the bus, which was a South America style coach with an upstairs, four feet of legroom, sleepy-reclining seats and plenty of space all round. We were quite happy. And as we ambled along, further into Thailand, we all imagined that we'd arrive in Bangkok earlier than expected. It was only four in the afternoon, after all.

We hit Bangkok at rush hour, which is a period between three and eight in the evening when the traffic is stationary. It was 5pm. It was dark and we went nowhere. We tried to work out where we were and where we wanted to stay based on road names and a guidebook map, and a few times we thought about getting out and finding a taxi to take us directly to the hostel. Each time we thought it, someone from the bus chatted to the driver about being let out and was refused. So we sat, trapped, and watched the traffic.

I've stopped being amazed at how many people you can fit into a pick-up truck, but I think there is a law that says the number is inversely proportional to the wealth of the country. In Cambodia it was often more than twenty, here, all the trucks had seven or eight young men in the back, sometimes lounging on broken deckchairs or garden furnitute. Most of them waved at us, and another law says that someone always has to respond to a wave. And it's me.

It took almost three hours to get through Bangkok, and we finally stopped at the side of a road. As I was getting off the bus, I bashed my toe on a bit of a seat and it crunched rather unpleasantly. Not a good end to a day that had been long and uncomfortable. We flagged down a taxi and explained where we wanted to go, and after a minute or so I asked the driver to put the meter on. He obliged but was grumpy for the rest of the trip. We were close to our destination and we called to him that we were almost there, but he carried on, convinced that we wanted to go to the big shopping mall. He squeezed into the traffic jam and stopped. We told him we wanted to go back to the road we'd passed, he huffed and puffed and grumbled a lot and then decided that he wasn't going to take us much closer than a mile away. It was still pouring with rain and our bags were heavy, we were both tired and my toe was sore. We lugged the bags, I stepped into a deep, hot puddle and then we arrived at the hostel.

Which wasn't bad. We went out for supper, I had something that consisted almsot entirely of crushed chillies, chillis and chilli seeds, and the rain poured through the cafe roof and lightning struck the building behind us by the sound of things, and we went back to the hostel and cured the day by sleeping without intending to wake up.