India and Nepal 1987

Bangkok

9.20am. We're sitting in the restaurant at Kathmandu's airport, trying hard to spend the last of our money. It's not easy. Having overcome the little detail of Mary's ticket not being valid (no Dabin Travel stamp), we've got ourselves seats 9a, 10a and 11a, ie one behind the other on the left side of the aircraft. Touch wood, this should mean a view of the mountains as we leave Nepal.

12.10pm. Our choice of seats paid off. We had a beautiful view of the Himalayas while our pilot told us their names. Kanchenjunga was on its own, out to the right, then the first mountain in the main range was Makalu, then Everest, along with Nuptse and Lhotse, looking like three pyramids. Since the plane was brand-new and the perspex unscratched, the photographs I took should come out OK.

3.29pm Bangkok time (2.14 Kathmandu). On approach to Bangkok. It's been a good flight. Our plane is a Boeing 757, a very elegant aircraft, and smooth and quiet in the air. We've been flying at 37,000ft, and through the window we've had an ever-changing view of the tropics - from Nepal's red-brick villages and the snowy peaks of the Himalayas to the green hills around Darjeeling. Then Burma's patchwork of little, square fields, huge river deltas, the sea, blue with clay-red areas where sediment pours off the land, then the hills of Thailand. We've seen several rainbows, one circular on the cloud below, and one beautiful, bright rainbow where white sheets of rain were pouring down from a fluffy, white cumulus cloud onto the green, sunlit land below.

We've also had a lot of cloud and mist, and we're headed through a greyish cloudscape now, with only distant streaks of blue showing (sky or land? It's too far away to tell).

We've been warned that Bangkok will be hot and humid. Delhi all over again? We'll find out soon enough.

9pm. Yes, as far as humidity's concerned, it's like Delhi. In every other respect, however, Bangkok is different. It's clean, full of variety and there are no beggars. I like it already. We're staying in the "Hello" guest house (of which I suspect there are several). It's 50b each, which is £1.14 (or about US$2). All around are near-identical restaurants/bars, each showing 3 videos a night. You don't choose where to eat, it's which film do you want to see.

But the food is such as we have not yet seen - barbecues on the pavement with fresh fish, mussels, cockles, satay. We're gradually recovering, and I think we may be hitting the food in a big way in Thailand - even the local food sounds so much more appetising than dal and rice.

P.S. We had the invaluable help of a Thai lad called Phy Lo (I'm guessing the spelling - pron. Pylo). He told us which bus to get to Banglamphu (No 59), how much it would cost (2b), how far it was (6km), how long it would take (2 hours - pardon?) and where to get off (the Golden Horse). It wasn't his fault that we paid 20b for a taxi to take us twice round the block before finding that our guest house was a few doors along the street from where we caught it.

Bangkok Chinatown - coffins, chickens, Mercedes and lottery tickets. Smelly - meat cooking, or dried fish. First food shock was chicken embryos. Yuk. Had first mangosteens. Delicious. It's 3.20pm now. Booking our ticket to Koh Samui was a breeze - helped by very friendly Thais. 399b for a 2nd Class lower berth with connecting bus and ferry to Koh Samui. That's on Wednesday. Bangkok station - colonial architecture, lots of columns and an arched roof without supporting pillars.

[...and that's where my diary ends, thanks to the thief who broke into our flat and stole all my camera gear, along with the other volume of my travel diary, in January 1991. Scum.]