Sally-Part 58.THAILAND'S TURN TWO!

JANNY TRYING TO TRANSFER A LITTLE INTELLIGENCE INTO JULIAN'S BRAIN! UNFORTUNATELY THE WIRING MUST HAVE BEEN FAULTY AS ALL THAT HAPPENED WAS THAT HIS EARS GREW AND HIS NOSE STARTED TWITCHING!

JUST A REMINDER OF THEIR ENGLISH WEDDING WITH JULIAN IN HIS WAITER'S SUIT AS HE HAD TO GET STRAIGHT BACK TO WORK AT THE SAVOY HOTEL! ( That's just in case any terrorists reading this get the impression that he might be wearing an army Captain's uniform!  There you are Julian, all safe now. I don't know what anyone was worried about! You in the army? How ridiculous! KUH! )

I was probably beyond tiredness, being jet-lagged and in a different time zone after having had two seven hour flights, arriving at 6am British time!

I got through customs, gladly unchecked and met Janni's family who drove me to my hotel, an hour away and my first experience of  incredible heat and one hundred percent humidity!

Julian wasn't due until the next day and so Janni took me to a local shop and showed me how to buy things by looking at the price on the ticket of the item I wanted to buy and then giving the assistant the equivalent amount in well marked coins rather like I'd eventually learned to do in England!

With my powerful intellect, I was soon able to purchase a coffee and a cake without too many problems!

And then Janni left me to sleep for the first time in a day and a half ( this is my son's wife and NOT what you foul lot are thinking!!! ) and I knew that once my head touched the pillow that that would be it for at least twelve hours!

For those of you who have never stayed in a tropical climate in a hotel with air conditioning, here's what happens.

You shower and try to get dry and collapse into bed and sleep for two minutes before you wake up bathed in sweat.

So you drag yourself to the thermostat switch, in my case without my glasses on which meant blind and squint at the instructions which are written in such small type that you  need your glasses to be on to read and return for your glasses, returning to the thermostat to discover that the instructions are not only tiny but unsurprisingly for Thailand, in Thai !

So you press a selection of buttons and slide some slides until an arctic blast hurls you back to the bed and oblivion!

Two minutes later you wake up shivering and covered in ice until you manage to drag yourself back to the thermostat without your glasses on but press some more buttons and slide some more slides anyway until the air starts to warm up and stagger back to bed for a desperately longed for long sleep which once again lasts for two minutes until you wake up burning hot because you've turned the heater on full and the room now stinks of electric wires melting!

Then to get the stink out you open the window only to be blasted by the hottest, wettest air imaginable and the deafening sound of thousands of cars and buses driving directly outside your window!

 So you slam the window shut, set the thermostat slides and buttons about in the middle and pass out!

I never did master that thermostat and eventually decided that it would be wisest to simply acclimatize and eventually worked out how to turn it off!

Breakfast was awful and when Julian arrived he insisted that we went to eat at his favourite roadside stall set out under a flyover which magnified the unbearable noise tenfold!

Now when I say roadside I mean a stall with some tables set out along a kerb beside a motorway's worth of traffic passing three feet from the tables and you and belching out great clouds of black fumes at head height!

There were thousands of these stalls plying their trade all over the city and in fact everywhere you travel in the Orient.

Shouting our orders at the owner come cook come washer-up above the roar of the vehicles, we ate chicken with noodles and a coke and I paid, as I was going to do for the rest of the trip, something ridiculous like a pound for the lot!

I noticed that beneath the stall was a large plastic bowl of brownish water used for both food preparation and washing up!

I KNEW that I was going to be ill and just hoped that 'Rough Guide's' advice to buy and take 'Ciprofloxicene' from a Thai pharmacy would be effective if the two hundred 'Immodium Rapids' and five hundred 'Paracetamol Extras' I'd brought out from home failed to ease the pain and other problems that I was bound to suffer and which I don't want to dwell on here!

Ciprofloxicene is only available in England as a last-resort antibiotic for horses!

But I can assure you that when you feel like I was rapidly about to feel, Ciprofloxicene is a gift from heaven and I didn't care about the long term side effects!

Illness did not take long to overwhelm my delicate system!

And this was really only day one of ten!

And let's not pretend that Julian AND Janni didn't succumb as well!