Saturday 24th OUCH!

Woke up very sore. Ankle bad, cuts and bruises all up my right side and a bit of a hangover!

Kerrie, bless her, helped me hobble to a chemist and I struggled about town a bit, but in the end I went back to the hotel and watched the walking wounded from the night before stagger back in! Apparently the thai cooking lessons were not enhanced by the olympian hangovers and i didn't miss much at the pottery factory.

Caved and hobbled up the road for a MacDonalds... turns out everybody else did the same! International hangover food. Tasted so bland after all the good Thai stuff.

Very amusing to hear the increasingly dramatic stories about my fall. No-one actually saw what happened, but they seemed to have decided that I'd fallen off increasingly high walls. I suspect if I'd left it much longer before pointing out I'd just tripped over some rubble the story would have had me plummeting from a third floor balcony!

We caught the night train to Bangkok. Quite an experience. Chatted to Nok for a bit, she'd had index prints made up of some of her best pictures from the trip, which was really sweet of her.

Coen, Tom, Kerrie, Jens and I went to the "party cabin".. i.e. the dining car with open windows so people could smoke, bad music and intermittent disco lights) then we all crashed about 10.

I really enjoyed it - lying in my little bed (up to my eyeballs in painkillers) and watching the world go by. You could see these thin red lines running up the hills as we trundled through the countryside. Forest fires. They don't worry as long as the fires aren't threatening property as it's part of the trees' life cycle. and the fires don't seem to rage, just steadily burn in these thin lines.