Call me sheltered, but I'd never ventured outside Australia's eastern states before August 2009. I'd driven up and down the coast of Australia, from Cape Tribulation in the North (well, about 3kms short of Cape Tribulation in the north - and then my sister got bitten ON THE EYEBALL by some kind of freaky insect so we had to cut short our journey and race her to a hospital while her eye swelled up to the size of a kiwi fruit - she is totally a fun killer), to Phillip Island in the south of Victoria (for motoGP), and as far west as Dubbo in Central Western NSW (we had a family farm out there at one stage). So I'm not exactly what you would call "travelled". So the idea of heading over to South East Asia with no ability to speak the language, no bookings, no set itinerary and pretty much no idea was a somewhat terrifying experience for me. But, like all men, when peer pressure is involved that whole "false bravado" thing takes over, and so what seemed like a pretty stupid and risky idea at the time (I had Vietnamese customers actually telling me that they wouldn't go on their own to Vietnam) turned into one of the best holidays of all time. Of ALL TIME.

First of all, let me say 9 hours on a flight isn't as long as I'd thought it would be, especially when you have spare seats to play with, movies to watch, and someone as entertaining as Spenny to keep you amused. There were probably 4 times on that flight when Spenny decided that he needed something from his bag in the overhead lockers, and probably 4 times he couldn't actually get the lockers open. Have you ever seen an angry chimp trying to open a jar of pickles? Watching him trying to discretely shove, pull and bash the overhead lockers open without looking like a foolish crazed terrorist is actually kinda funny. What makes it funnier is the facial expressions of those passengers who watch him jiggle and shake for a good two minutes, only to sit down in abject misery and failure, but try the exact same thing over and over again. Hilarious. Oh, seeing Spenny try and scam an extra dinner out of the hostesses by claiming there really is a person sitting in the vacant seat between us, also hilarious.

So, touchdown in Bangkok at 10:00pm local time.

Three minutes later at 10:03pm and we have our first drama of the holiday. Hinton and I have lost Spenny in Bangkok international terminal. It was our own little missing persons case. One minute he was next to me, the next he was gone.We waited for him for 5 minutes just outside the plane in the corridor, and when he failed to turn up, we assumed he must be ahead of us so we started walking to immigration. Now, BKK airport is freaking huge, and it took us a good 15 minutes just to get to immigration. Still no sign of Spenny (and lets be honest, a big white guy kinda stands out in an airport full of Thai's). We couldn't see him, couldn't find him, and couldn't call him because he decided against bringing his phone.

Great. We are 20 minutes into our 2 week journey, and we are already a man down. So, after an in depth conversation with Hinton around the topic "how pissed would Spenny be if we just left without him", we decided that he wouldn't want us sitting around moping over his disappearance, and would want us to go on without him for the sake of the holiday, so we wandered off through the immigration check and onto the baggage claim. For the record we got in contact with Spenny after around 30 minutes of *frantic* searching in the bar and all safely made it out of the terminal. And apparently he did have his phone with him after all. Oh well.

So, my first impressions of Bangkok? Very hot, even at 10pm at night, the air was humid and heavy, everywhere was noisy, but worst of all everything smelled like it had been wrapped in road kill at some stage in its life. Seriously, wherever I went in Bangkok it smelled like a mix of rotting custard apple, poo and vomit. And to make it all worse in all this oppressive heat and stench, you get disoriented WAY too easily. I really had no idea where I was going because as far as I can tell the entire city was modeled on a giant ball of wool. There seems to be no major central business districts or hubs that are surrounded by suburban housing... instead everything is jumbled together in random little knots. You will walk out of a major 40 level hotel, which is next door to a 2 storey house, next to a bar, next to some vacant blocks, on the corner of a random small housing estate which is sandwiched between a massive shopping complex. The taxi driver took us from the airport, down some big freeway, turned down some dodgy looking alleyway filled with old houses and homeless children, and then hooked a left turn through a massive hospital in the middle of no-where, out onto some other alleyways and into our hotel.

Not for one moment did I know where I was in Bangkok. Not once. I was disoriented, hazy, overheated and uncomfortable. For me, being in Bangkok was like surviving in an over sized clothes dryer. Filled with babies nappies. Dirty babies nappies. Fortunately, things were just about to take a turn for the interesting...

To be continued...