Dave: The perfect hangover cure..

.. does NOT involve getting up after 6 hours sleep and driving out of Bangkok. It may involve a bottle of M-150 though! The name itself just shouts ‘all natural pick me up’. Inspired by our taxi driver last night who seemed VERY keen on the stuff, I decided to buy a bottle this morning from the servo when we got fuel. I can’t read the ingredients, because it’s all in Thai, but if I had to guess I would say that they make it by taking six litres of Red Bull and distilling it down to the 250ml of syrupy goodness you get in your standard bottle of M-150. Followed up with a 600ml iced coffee, it does the trick though! What you shouldn’t then do however, is try some ‘Cuttlefish Flavoured Crispy Peas’. (While writing this, and in hindsight I realise now that might actually be rather obvious advice). I figured they couldn’t possible be as bad as they sound. I was wrong – they are much, much worse. I actually ate some before I smelt them, which was probably a mistake in itself. If I was again to guess how they made these – I’d say that they’d start by going to a service station and buying some fish bait, then they’d leave it in the sun for a day or two. They would then mash that up to a paste, and spread it on some dried peas, and then let the whole lot dry out. If you were to try and define the opposite of hangover food, you would come up with a picture of ‘Cuttlefish Flavoured Crispy Peas’.

Today was a bit of a landmark however, because we’ve finally made it to the beach – our first sighting of the ocean since the Black Sea in Turkey! After leaving Bangkok this morning and stopping for some new tyres on the car (£220 for four Bridgestones – bargain!) we had a fair drive down to Chomphon where we’re staying tonight. Unfortunately the monsoons have caught up with us, but that didn’t stop us going for a kayak out across the bay and having a swim.

The car also got a bit more TLC at Subaru in Bangkok. After a bit of a hunt with the satnav, we did finally find the ‘Subaru Dealer’. Unfortunately the guy in charge only spoke two words in English, and one of those words was ‘no’, in response to the question ‘Do you speak English?’. Luckily though there was another customer there who did speak English (and also had a cool turbo Vovlo, but I digress) and he helped us out with the translation of “We’d like an oil change, new air filter, and can you see if you can sort out the bloody rattle near the front right wheel”. About 40 minutes later, after they’d taken some other poor customers car off the host to do ours, we had an oil change, new air filter, and they’d fixed the bloody rattle! (a worn swaybar bush, in case you’re interested). Result!