Signed up on Tuesday for a Wednesday morning bus to Bangkok. Like many backpacker busses, they told me it would pick me up at the hotel. They said I should be outside around 6:30am.

However, for one reason or another, I ended up staying up too late Tuesday night, just diddling about, etc. Not surprisingly, I completely slept through my alarm (sometimes the incessant but quiet of my Palm Pilot beeping just doesnšt cut it). Awoke with a knock on the door at 7:15. I flew out of bed and checked my watch. Shit. I had missed the bus by a long shot... opened the door and no one was there. Still, I flew into action and madly grabbed all my stuff and crammed it into my bags. Down the stairs to see if maybe, by chance the bus was waiting for me.

No bus, but a young man said, "follow me." Luckily, I was still asleep enough to not really have the presence of mind to think about what happened next. Followed the man out the door to his motorbike. With all three of my bags we get on the motor bike... two bags slung across my shoulder, the other, biggest, balanced on the bar between the driveršs legs.

"Where's the bus?" I asked. "We'll catch up," came the reply.

Shit. We proceeded to weave between the craters and potholes that constitute what pass for streets at what felt like 70mph as we raced out of town trying to catch the bus. Luckily, after about ten minutes, we saw the bus gassing up at a station not far ahead. For the first time, I became very glad for the local habit of waiting until the bus is fully loaded to bother buying gas for the journey. With my head hung low, I hopped aboard the bus to the scornful looks of the other travelers, who, pour souls, hadnšt gotten to sleep in like me.

We headed out of town on the recently "upgraded" "highway" 6. As far as I can tell, the "upgrade" consisted mostly of just filling the craters that were so common on the roads inside town. It was a bone-rattling ride down the dirt road, though a beautiful one, with both sides of the road surrounded by rice paddies that were the lushest green Išve ever seen and which extended as far as the eye could see. We carried on for about and hour before hitting a traffic jam. Nothing was going anywhere, just people walking between trucks that seemed to have been parked there for ages. "Bridge is out," said one of the bus operators. We piled out of the bus grabbing all our stuff and proceeded to walk up the road, as visions of wading through rice paddies while trying to hold my bags above me raced through my head. Luckily, things were a bit more organized. We walked passed pickups being driven down the embankment on to makeshift rafts for delivery to the other side. There was no way our bus would have made it across on the raft. Luckily, our tour operators had their act pretty well together and had stationed another bus to wait for us on the other side. And, in another stroke of luck, a tiny walkway of two planks suspended just above the water had been put together next to the twisted metal of the washed out bridge.