2003-06-15 - 9:14 a.m.

Krabbi, Thailand

My anti-jetlag pills seem to have skewed my sleeping patterns good and proper, so I'm getting up at 6am despite having been on the beach drinking generic Thai beer about three hours ago. This place is too full of lithe 18 year olds trying to find themselves, and laughing at the journalists in the backpacker bars who go back to their swanked up luxury apartments at the end of the night. fair enough, I suppose.

Bangkok was the usual blur of insanely dull conferences about how Thailand doesn't have SARS, oh no not at all, as confirmed by a procession of increasingly tedious public officials, and hotel inspections ("Yes, how impressive that you have rooms with showers...") followed by bouts of snot-flying drunkenness as buying rounds here barely requires you to break into paper money. A tour of the Grand Palace with a hangover in 103% humidity should be on everyone's list of things not to do before you're 30, by the way.

But the Thais are loveable, and down south, the relaxation begins to hit, sitting around in bars apparently staffed by a particularly lenient strain of Zen practitioners - I think their religion is called I Can't believe it's Not Buddha. Massages, food, drink, open insulting of the more objectionable fellow journalists....yeah, there are worse gigs. Being hauled off to look at the swimming facilities at the complex ("Er, so what chlorine levels are you using?") so blah blah blah until London in three days.

As they say in these parts, "That'll be a life sentence in a urine-drenched wooden cage for marijuana possession, thank you very much."