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We flew Air Asia to get down to Hat Yai in the deep south of Thailand.
The flight was delayed for two hours due to some problems with the generation of cabin pressure.
Once underway, the pilot kept slowing the plane as much as he could and then putting on a rapid burst of speed as if trying to kick start a motor somewhere.
This was a bit unnerving.
Looking out of the window the ground speed seemed to grind towards zero, and I found myself wondering about stall speeds and gliding capabilities of this ageing jet.
We landed at Hat Yai airport with only a temporary group psychosis to overcome and went directly to Songkhla on the eastern coast, where we booked into a plush hotel.
Songkhla turned out to be a bit dreary despite the lengthy coastline, and we would only have stayed a couple of nights had Linda not made a poor dietary decision and picked up a nasty dose of food poisoning.
Prior to that she noticed a set of about 20 raised circular welts on her arms.
"Flea bites" I said, thinking of a mangy mutt that
Cherating
sea turtle centrewe had passed that day, "probably be gone by morning".
I knew that would not pass muster.
"What if it's ringworm", said Linda, eyes wide with alarm at this unconscionable thought, "Chemist. Now!"
The hotel doorman put us in a taxi that seemed to drive for miles, possibly to the towns' most distant pharmacy.
"Insect bites" said the pharmacist dryly as Linda held her arms aloft, and sold us a tube of anti-histamine cream for 20p.
Later that night, as the food poisoning was kicking in, Linda was on the toilet having diarrhoea when a small rat crossed in front of her, making its way between the curtains and the sideboard.
Suddenly the stale smell and funny noises were explained.
Upon further examination it appeared that the rat had become trapped in the hotel room and lived there full time, as I could find no possible routes in and out.
This would explain the smallness of the rat, as a diet of hotel guests crumbs is undoubtedly meagre.
We reported this to the hotel management, who gave us a shrug of the shoulders and a sweet smelling room.
Cherating
sea turtle centre Rats, fleas and illness in such close quarters gave me pause for thought, but as Linda failed to develop any glandular buboes over the next few days I was soon able to relax.
From Songkhla I had anticipated heading down the coast via a couple of handily placed towns to get to Malaysia, but a recent bombing campaign by those Islamic separatists put paid to that, so we went back to Hat Yai to catch a train the next day.
I went out to an Internet café and returned to find Linda in floods of tears.
"I don't want to go to Malaysia", she wailed, "I don't want to go to an island only 2 kilometres in length".
For a moment I thought that a late oestrus had transported me back to the world of PMT, then I realised that she had been reading the guidebook.
Linda doesn't so much read the guidebook as analyse it for any hint of negativity, either explicit or implied, about forthcoming destinations.
"Why can't we go to places we know we like, like Krabi and Hua Hin?" she sobbed.
I put my arm around her shoulders and
Cherating
sea turtle centre treated her to my most charmingly condescending smile.
"We've still got more than 2 months left" I explained. "What's the point of sitting on familiar beaches and eating in familiar restaurants when there are new beaches and new restaurants to experience. That's what travel is all about, otherwise it's just a holiday."
That night we went out for a pizza and looked around the central shopping area for a while.
Shortly after returning to our room we heard a couple of loud bangs a few streets away. These turned out to be more bombs, in the area we had just left.
Four people were killed and forty injured, all but one were Malay.
On the morning train we were accompanied by numerous policemen toting semi-automatic machine guns as we progressed through the Muslim heartlands towards the border.
As expected, standards dropped and prices rose as soon as we entered Malaysia.
We stayed two nights in Kota Bharu (one night too many) for the purpose of maxing out the ATM card.
The mid-range hotel was pretty depressing and the town was uninspiring, so Linda felt fully justified in maintaining a sour
Kuala Lumpur
Petronas Towers countenance for the duration.
Our first proper destination was the Perhentian Islands that, rather excitingly, are approached by speedboat.
There are two Perhentian islands, imaginatively subtitled 'big' and 'small'.
We got off at 'small', as this is where the budget accommodation is situated.
Despite low season discounts the majority of accommodation was of a standard we usually take pains to avoid. Even the pricey resort we eventually settled on was barely worth the heavily discounted cost of a basic wooden room.
We stayed on Coral Beach, which was littered with coral from the nearby reefs.
A short walk across the island was Long Beach, a groaning cliché of powdery sand, clear blue sea and palmed fringes. Consequently we spent most of our time here.
As I had hoped, the combination of sun, a sun lounger, a few new books and french fries returned Linda to her usual humour.
The paradisical illusion at Long Beach was sullied by nature itself when thousands of sea urchins took part in a life cycle suicide pact and came up onto the beach to die, leaving a carpet of corpses along the high tide line.
No
prizes for guessing who trod on one and got a clutch of spines embedded in the sole of her foot.
We easily passed a couple of weeks on this island but it was becoming clear that low season was petering out to no season as monsoon time approached and the number of people around was in obvious decline.
We returned to the mainland and went down the coast to Cherating, a seaside hangout with a big beach and pleasant memories from a stay there in 1991.
No pleasant memories were forthcoming this time as the place was as dead as a doornail.
Despite available accommodation for thousands, we saw only about a half dozen other tourists, all looking a bit bemused like us.
The saving grace was the sea turtle centre, situated in an area where the turtles come ashore to lay their eggs.
The centre collects the eggs for incubation and releases the hatchlings into the sea.
This is part of a last ditch Government attempt to save turtles around Malaysia's coastline, where numbers have collapsed over a couple of decades.
No leatherback turtles have been seen in Malaysian waters
for over 4 years.
Efforts appear to be bearing fruit on this stretch of beach as, year on year, the numbers of the three remaining species coming ashore have increased modestly to about 130 individuals.
We headed across country to one of the nicest of Asian cities, Kuala Lumpur.
As I had been there a few times before there was not much incentive to do the tourist bit, except walk to the Petronas Towers which were built as the worlds tallest building (subsequently eclipsed) in the time since my last visit.
The other thing which has changed in the intervening years is the arrival of the annual haze, caused by excessive land clearance by fire in Indonesia, and carried by prevailing winds over much of the Malay peninsular.
I had heard of it before, but it had not occurred to me that we might be affected by it during our own travels.
In fact, it was front-page news in every paper.
Air particulate indices are published for many towns and cities, and most were bordering on 'unhealthy' levels.
Walking around the city one might not be aware of it, but you
only have to look up towards the nearby skyscrapers, which are like shrouded icons, to realise the density of the airborne ash.
We took a bus from KL up the East coast, towards Pangkor Island.
This was a seven-hour journey, but almost the entire time the haze restricted our views to the near and middle distance.
It was as if someone had stolen the horizon, and the sufferers of the enforced myopia had every right to be indignant.
Once on Pangkor Island we went to one of the main beach areas only to find it equally as deserted as Cherating had been.
I negotiated a decent discount for a week in a nice chalet but, since there was only one café open, coupled with alternating sunshine and thunderstorms, 5 days was as much as we could bear.
Logically, we should have continued North via Penang and Langkawi.
In Penang we realised that it would be too depressing to go to Langkawi and find more of the same out of season malaise.
We decided that we'd had enough of Malaysia and took a minibus back into Thailand, where we spent a
final month loitering around in, err, Krabi and Hua Hin, obviously.
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