I’m off to Myanmar/Burma tonight, where I shall try to make sure my modest hard currency gets into the hands of local people and not in SLORC pockets. Internet access is barely available, so no posts for a few weeks. And thanks for your patience if you’re waiting for email replies from me; I will write back, I promise.

In Kanchanaburi, I rented a little pink bike, the kind I might have dreamed of when I was five years old and learning to ride on a too-big bike borrowed from Ronan MacMahon. I crossed the river and left the town behind. The countryside was vivid under the clouds rolling in for the evening light show, and the bicycle breeze was a relief in the sultry afternoon. Low blue hills ring Kanchanaburi, and in the distance you can see the famous Kwai bridge. It is modest for the suffering it cost.

A snake slithered in front of my wheel and I shrieked but soon calmed down. I’ve also got over my fear of the stray dogs that roam everywhere. For the most part, they are as placid as the Thai people, at least the ones that aren’t out of their brains on speed. Roosters stepped fussily around every house, and here and there were knots of zebus, cow-like creatures I’ve only ever seen in pictures of Africa before. A bull made a half-hearted, shambling run at me, but was tugged back by his tether.

I left the main road. I was hungry. In Bangkok, I’d developed a taste for madeleine-shaped rice-porridge cakes, which are cooked in a special griddle so that the outside is crisp as communion wafer and the inside holds a spoonful of sweet porridge, sometimes flavored with sweetcorn or scallions. They’re addictive, and I was disappointed not to find them in Kanchanaburi. Then, like a mirage, I passed a single foodstand in a tiny village. A woman was making my finger-porridge discs. I came to a wobbly stop and turned back to her. We said grinning hellos. Three small boys came tearing down the path.
   ‘Falang! Fa-lang!‘ they screamed with joy.
   ‘Sawat dii kha. Hel-lo.’ I said. They were beside themselves.
   ‘Falang! Falang!’ they hooted again. The oldest might have been four. They lined up in a row, pointed at me and cracked up.
   ‘Falang,’ I observed to the adults, who laughed that I knew how foreign I was. I felt like a stray Gulliver.

The woman gave me my porridge cakes, a dozen in a banana-leaf basket for a quarter. I burned my tongue on the first one but kept smiling and nodding through my tears. A small crowd gathered to watch me eat.
   ‘Hal-lo! Hal-lo!’
To each other: ‘Falang!’

The little boys raced around and climbed on my pink bike. There was some debate as to which direction I should take to get back to the cave temple I showed them on my map. Eventually, shrugs. I could go left or right. I would find it eventually, no?

I finished my cakes and with nods and wais all round, wobbled off again. On these backroads, everyone smiled and waved at me, the pale falang on the pink bike.
   ‘Hal-lo! What your name?’
Drivers honked. Toddlers found me hilarious. I felt like a visiting celebrity, dogding chickens and grinning ear to ear.

Back on the main road, I sweated up a hill on my toy bicycle. The cave temple was at the top. It was close to sunset, and I could hear the rumble of chanting monks in another building, so the temple itself was empty. A nun in white robes sat at the entrance gate.
    ‘Pay what you like. Temple one-way only.’

I climbed down the steps into the belly of the hill. The temple was a series of caves, 300 meters long. In the first, a gaudy Buddha sat surrounded by other statues, some Hindu. Vishnu stood bodyguard. Among the offerings was a waterfall scene done in luminous paint, like those Painter of Light™ efforts that sell so well. The goldleaf sheets that worshippers stick on statues of the Buddha were peeling off.

The enchantment grew deeper in. These caves were a wonder, intimate and magnificent all at once. In some chambers, the vaulted ceilings were more intricate than any Gothic cathedral. I could see Gaudi in others, where the walls sloped and curved in crazy organic shapes. I am a city chick for sure; I see nature and it represents human art to me every time.

In some passages I had to stoop and twist through while bats flitted past, and I felt like a Buddhist Lara Croft. The strip lighting gave a Sixth Street grotto feel, and there were small shrines everywhere. In the innermost chamber, dead silence. I thought I might hear the earth pant if I stayed still enough. Instead, there was just the occasional batwing and the flicker of a fluorescent light. ‘This Way’ said the signs in red paint on the walls; polite temple graffiti.

Close to the exit, I could hear a deep heartbeat. Maybe the earth really was panting. I climbed out into a steel cage that guarded the exit hole. The heartbeat turned out to be a booming bass-line from the karaoke barges a mile below on the river.

The evening chanting was finished, and I greeted the tattooed young monk who was singing Thai pop-songs with his pals. I pedalled back to town in time to sip beer on a river deck and watch the daily thunderstorm.

Somewhere or other I picked up a local list of Bangkok emergency numbers that reads as follows:

Police     *151
Fire        *190
Grime     *195

They’ve got their work cut out.

Mark, my man-about-town pal from Koh Tao, was back in Bangkok for a few days. He’s English, and has the groovy air of a Sixties fashion photographer. He suggested an Irish bar in Silom, perhaps as a concession to my unglamorous travel wardrobe, where we were unhappy to discover New York bar prices after two months of dollar beers.

In the taxi on the way back, the driver didn’t know Si Ayuthaya Street.
   ‘Take us to Silom Center, I show you from there,’ said Mark. We thought he agreed, but at Silom Center he wanted us to get out.
   ‘No, straight-straight ahead,’ Mark pointed, ‘I show you.’
   ‘You say Silom Center! I take you Silom Center! I not know Si Ayuthaya. You want drive back with me show me way back? You say Silom Center!’ He was visibly upset, and Mark was annoyed.
   ‘How long you driver? This not good. Si Ayuthaya big street, major street.’
We paid him, got our of the cab, and hailed another. As we walked towards it, the first driver leapt out and shoved Mark. Hard. Mark turned to square up to him. He was much bigger. The driver paused, then darted back to the trunk of his taxi and pulled out a length of metal piping. Mark stood there, confused, as I yelled at him to come on, get in the cab for Christ’s sake. The second driver was scared and wanted to drive off, but I hung off the back passenger door. Mark slammed the front door shut just as the crazy taxi driver reached us and banged on the bumper.
   ‘Drive! Drive!’
Our new driver lurched forward, wondering what the crazy falangs had done to provoke so.

Speed is sold (it’s said) directly by the government for 5 baht (12 cents) a pill. Bus-drivers are notorious for it, particularly long-distance drivers. So are songthaew drivers and taxistas. In a country where visible anger is seen as loss of face, I’ve seen a screaming Thai woman punch out a German tourist for refusing to rent a motorbike that was clearly broken. In Koh Samui, a songthaew driver chased my friend Andy with a machete over a ten-baht fare dispute. Waking up on a night-bus is a white knuckle experience as you realize just how fast you’re going.

   ‘Ya-ba, mate. He’s on ya-ba,’ Mark told the new driver, who shrugged. Who isn’t?

I’m a sucker for this kind of lofty marketing, and I bought three Moleskine notebooks before I left New York. Two large squared and one small ruled. That was the store’s entire stock, so I ordered two more online to be delivered to London to pick up on my way. These notebooks are perfect, you see. The binding opens completely flat. The pages are lightweight enough for travel but substantial enough that ink doesn’t bleed through. There’s an accordion pocket in the back for cards and clippings, and a ribbon placeholder. A built-in elastic band holds the sturdy covers closed in my backpack. Inside, there’s space for a name and address and a proposed reward if returned to the owner. I taped a poem to the back flap and a note from my friend Paul Ford to the front flap. On the second-last page I keep a running list of things I’m seeing for the first time: water buffalo, spirit houses, pufferfish, fried cockroaches… On the last page, I write the names of books I read on this trip.

I’ve always been a greedy, lazy reader. I used to buy stacks of books and I flew through them, skipping whole sentences and paragraphs in a race to the end (and was easily distracted by the next book before I got there.) My bookshelves, more than my brain, were the real repository, since I could always go back some day and give each book the attention it deserved. I was particular about reading—I hated to borrow, and I disliked hardcovers that were heavy on the subway, or very old second-hand books that smelled musty.

Now, though, each book represents a half of pound of paper that I have to lug around. Before I left, I worried about what to do with finished books. I knew I couldn’t ship everything home, even if I had one. Max suggested that if I were really bothered, I could tear out and keep the title page of each book before trading or selling it. But I can’t bring myself to collect scalps in this way. Instead, my reading habits have changed. I read more slowly, knowing I own each book for just a short time. I savor sentences. I copy whole chunks into my fancy notebook, and when I’m finished, I trade two-for-one to get the next book. Now that I earn each book in a way I never did before, I’m grateful. This Moleskine notebook, my $17 confidante, the analog laptop that holds a draft of everything I post here, has become my library and my home.

There was a huge black Labrador bitch sleeping at the Lomprayah speedboat pier in Koh Tao. Crowds of people stepped over her or kicked her in the rush to board. Her uterus was prolapsed and her drooping dugs were sore. As a black Lab mix, she was already unusual on an island of yellow mutts, but more distinctive yet was the neon orange slogan spray-painted on her head and flanks. The paint had cracked and worn from her scratching and you couldn’t read it any more. Someone’s idea of a joke.

My second afternoon on the island, she climbed up to the open-air sala where I was reading and flopped down on her back under the hammock, so that my backside almost rested on her swollen belly. She panted slowly and I thought she was dying, or in labor. I gave her some water. She panted on, and then she fell asleep.

The next time I saw her was at the Whitening Bar, which functioned as my office through my stay. Friday was Whitening’s party night, when we regulars sniffed at the package holiday farangs with their plastic buckets of cocktails. The smart Bangkok set who ran the bar shrugged—these buckets of rum were lucrative. The dog loped in around midnight, still crusted with orange paint. I told my bar-pal Mark about the afternoon she’d passed out under my hammock and he laughed.

   “That dog’s an alcoholic, mate. Best-known boozer on the island. Noi says she’s figured out which night is party night in each of the bars. She shows up, finishes all the cocktail buckets she can find and throws up. She sleeps it off on the beach next day. Been doing it for years.”

We watched her nose around the low tables in the sand, stealing drinks. This, I decided, is what I like about Koh Tao. Further south, on Koh Samui, debauchery took the shape of fat old Germans with teenaged Thai girlfriends. On Koh Tao, only the old dogs are old dogs.

My blood is type O rhesus negative. The universal donor. It’s fairly rare, and word of my arrival went out early to the mosquitos of Thailand, who have gorged on my blood for two months now.

Before I left, Dr. Engel muttered darkly about the psychotropic effects of taking malaria pills for a whole year.
   ‘How bad is it where you’re going?’
   ‘I don’t know. Better than Africa. Or Central America.’
I didn’t want the malaria pills either. They cost more than a bag of smack and give you nightmares. Eventually, we agreed that I would wear long trousers and use DEET insect repellent.

This is what happens when I wear DEET.

I spread a thin layer on my exposed skin, as directed. It’s the extra-strength stuff that turns car-paint to carrot juice, so I wash my hands carefully. Then I get absorbed in a book or a chat. Without thinking, I scratch my existing bites with newly grown-out nails (with my new stress-free life, I no longer bite my nails—well, mostly). Then I chew my nails, just a little, because old habits die hard. My tongue goes numb. Burble…stagger…

I wash my hands again. And do it again. Meanwhile, the skeeters snicker in the shadows, waiting for me to scratch off all the DEET to expose their tender midnight snack.

Why do some people get bitten all the time? I’ve heard so many explanations—thinner female skin, blood sugar level, hormones, blood type. Whenever I meet someone who complains as much as I do, I ask their blood-type. Odds are they’re O negative too, the 8% of the population who are suckers enough to give blood to anybody but who can accept it only from each other. Can mosquitos sniff this gullibility? Is that why some people get to sit calmly, unblemished, while I scratch like a beach dog and treat every headache as incipient dengue fever?

   “Best night dive I’ve ever done, mate!” said Chris, my instructor, when we surfaced in the wine-dark sea. And it was, though I’d stepped on a sea-urchin in the dark and spat out my regulator when I yelped. In the dry world, gravity is stronger, and I haven’t yet got used to moving up and down at will. As I searched for my instructor in the dark, I sang a sacreligious variant on childhood hymn through my bubbles:

Chris be beside me
Chris be before me
Chris be behind me
King of my heart

Chris be above me
Chris be below me
Chris all around me
Never to part

At fifteen meters, we finally spotted the old sea-turtle that had eluded the Crystal Dive instructors for three years. They pantomimed delight with hand signals, but I felt sad for the dignified grandfather who was forced to leave his rest spot to swim away from rows of torchbeams. We formed a wetsuited cavalcade and the remora fish on his back went along for the ride.

A barracuda hunted by our dive-lights. He sliced past and snatched a middle-sized fish. Now I saw how many smaller creatures I’d ingested by proxy when I ate grilled barracuda the night before.

On the ocean floor, a blue-spotted yellow ray slid along like an omlette in a non-stick pan. Our lights passed through a huge, eerie jellyfish floating in mid-water.

My favorite, though, was the cranky squid. Chris trained his powerful halogen beam into the hollow where it lay. Like a teenager prodded to get up and do chores, it grumpily shunted along and plopped down a few inches away. And changed color. Chris followed it.
   “Jesus, Mom,” said the squid. “Can’t you see I’m resting?”
It shuffled along and changed color again, this time to dark purple.

    “Wicked, innit, how they do that colour change, the squid?” Chris said later. I agreed. But then, two months ago I wore unrelieved black, read the New Yorker and drank five cups of coffee a day. Today I wear red down to my pink-painted toes, flip-flops, and a bandanna. I’m re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I drink mango shakes. How did I become such a poster child for that annoying species, the backpacker? Perhaps I should conduct training courses for developmentally-challenged squid.