Day 119. Bangkok, Thailand. Tedious tummys.

We've both been suffering a spot of Delhi belly these past couple of days. Perfect preparation for a morning at the Indian embassy you'd think, while we wait in line for our Visas.

Not so.

This was tedious in the extreme, and after hours of waiting, then handing over sixty quid for the paperwork, we were told it'd be five working days before the Visas were ready.

And it gets worse.

The whole process was then repeated in the afternoon at the Vietnamese embassy, only this time the damage was a cool eighty big ones.

Not happy about this at all, the red tape is biting a sizable chunk out of our budget. God only knows what the boys from Burma will be demanding when we visit their embassy tomorrow.

Day 118. Bangkok, Thailand. The wrong shoes.

A real dilemma today. Do we take the 14 hour overnight bus up to Bangkok for a tenner, or the one and a half hour flight for twelve quid?

Call us crazy, but we opted to fly.

Met up with one of my old motorbiking buddies in the evening. Paul, or Grubby as we used to call him (it's a take on his name, not his table manners) has been living in Bangkok for a couple of years, working as a Creative Director at one of the big Advertising agencies.

Not that he's let success go to his head mind; driving a flash Merc to the swankiest bar in town (members only, Wend refused entry because of her flip-flops), with his stunning girlfriend Jo in the passenger seat.

He was horrified at the price of our digs - twelve quid - at the amusingly named 'Wendy House', refusing to believe there was such a vulgar concept as budget accommodation anywhere within walking distance of his high-flying world.

Anyway, the door staff eventually let Wend in as long as she promised to behave herself, and we had an entertaining evening talking about old motorbike trips and what all the disbanded gang are up to now (fascinating for the girls, as you can imagine).

Day 117. Hat Ton Sai, Thailand. Jumbled up.

Last day on the beach before we fly to Bangkok. Lots of travelling in the weeks ahead, so to ensure our batteries are fully charged we lay on the same spot of sand for several hours, moving only to buy beer and peanut butter sandwiches.

Beaten by another American at Scrabble in the evening. This time it was the lovely Kate from Portland who did the damage.

Introduced a new rule to liven things up a bit. After the game was finished we asked a random passer-by to select the most interesting word that had been played. Unfortunately, we asked a German whose command of English was obviously limited; he decided Kate's 'Dove' was superior to 'Wend's' 'Ukulele' and my 'Jumble'. So Kate received 25 bonus points and will be taking the honours back to Oregon.

I was bloody furious. I mean, how dull is 'Dove'?

Day 116. Hat Ton Sai, Thailand. Matt the airhead.

We've certainly met some interesting people during our week here on Hat Ton Sai. There's a semi-permanent community of westerners who've opted out of a conventional life back home and are helping the Thai's run the dive-shops, bars and cafes.

Once such character, Matt from Alberta, takes living frugally to new extremes. He sleeps in a cave just along from the beach, bums around in the sunshine all day, then helps out at 'Air's Pad Thai Palace' each evening in return for a plate of noodles.

He's a great lad, but a bit daft, and Wend found him this morning in some distress, suffering an allergic reaction to a handful of wild berries he'd necked for breakfast. His tongue and throat were both quite badly swollen, but she could just about hear him mumble "They looked kinda tasty".

The lady who runs the stall - Air (silly name, delightful person), acts as his surrogate mother, and they make a formidable, if unorthodox double act. She's a tiny slip of a thing with a big, big heart. We'll miss her, and her cooking, massively.

Got chatting to a couple of Aussie's later, and blow me if one of them - Jeremy - hasn't just finished a four year stint living on Petherton Road, yards from our flat in London. He had loads of pictures on his digital camera of Highbury Fields in the snow that he'd taken last week.

Made us quite homesick it did. For about 24 seconds.

+++Update+++Update+++Update+++Update+++Update+++

Matt's gone! He left this afternoon, leaving Air distraught. The other bit of bad news - disastrous news really - is he reckons 80% of the freehold to Hat Ton Sai has been bought by a consortium in Bangkok who intend to Bulldoze everything within 100 yards of the beach before building another sodding luxury resort.

The work's scheduled to start in a couple of months time, I think Matt just couldn't bear to be here to see his beloved beach ruined.

Progress, I think it's called.

Day 115. Hat Ton Sai, Thailand. Apocolypse now.

Hired a kayak in the morning to explore some of the neighbouring beaches and soon wished we hadn't bothered.

Actually, that's harsh. The kayaking was fun, and we did manage to get within yards of some extremely cheeky monkeys. But ultimately, the short trip brought home to us just how savage some of the development going on over here is.

I've already mentioned how depressed we were when we saw how nasty Rai Lee has become (an Aussie bloke we met last night reckoned the carnage there has all taken place in the past 12 months and that it was as hip as Hat Ton Sai the last time he visited). Well, head further along the coast and things are even worse.

The first bay we came to is home to a solitary mega resort, a joyless, sanitised, beast of a place patrolled by security guards in military style uniforms wearing walkie-talkies and carrying lots of attitude.

Horrible, horrible.

Paddle to the next bay though, and you'd be forgiven for reaching for your cyanide pill. Ao Mang beach, twinned with Sodom and Gomorrah, is a living, breathing example of what happens when laziness and greed are the driving factors behind 'improving' somewhere.

The waterfront restaurants and hotels are universally ugly, there's an incongruous concrete promenade running the length of the beach and some local bigwig has even decided traffic wardens are a good idea.

There's hardly any traffic mind, but what the hell, they've probably heard how much Camden council rake in each year from parking tickets and decided to give it a go.

Neither of us are exactly kayaking world champions, but we made it back to Ton Sai in record time.

Day 114. Hat Ton Sai, Thailand. Blue seas, black skies.

Took a boat trip out to some of the nearby islands for a spot of snorkeling this afternoon. It was good, in a not-nearly-as-spectacular-as-the-Philippines kind of way. The highlights being a bad tempered Titan triggerfish and swimming into a cave where no-one was quite brave enough to reach the bit without daylight.

The tour ended with some sunset scoff on a small uninhabited beach half an hour or so offshore.

Except thick clouds ensured there'd be no sunset, and we soon discovered the beach was far from being uninhabited. One minute we were enjoying the peace and quiet, the next, a right old racket was kicking up from the trees behind us. At first, we thought it was the resident birdlife having one last sing-song before lights out, but as the noise grew louder it became obvious something far more unusual was about to happen.

Then it started. Five or six large silhouettes appeared on the treeline before launching into the night sky. Again, we thought they must be birds, but the size of the things and their erratic, jaunty flapping action suggested otherwise. These were bats - very, very big bats.

Half a dozen soon became twenty or thirty, withing minutes there were hundreds, and before long so many bats were overhead, they literally turned the sky black.

It was great. And what made the spectacle even more awe-inspiring was the fact that once airborne, they immediately stopped calling, so by the time the last few stragglers left the trees the only noise to be heard was the clicking of our cameras as we tried in vain to capture the moment.