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After a night defined by confusing and tumultuous liaisons I watched the gleaming spires of the dawn Bangkok skyline from my wind speed tuk tuk. Sunday morning. Like a dream. I tried to remember what it was to sleep before dawn, but that was somebody else's life. My life had become completely nocturnal, and it was time to return to my Khao San Road crypt before the fierce mid-day heat melted my flesh.

My head was full of shit. Full of Singha, Kloster, Mekong, and coffee. The warm dawn air lashing against my face, and smelling as much of fetid khlong water as petroleum waste, merely made what was in my head feel murkier. The women had been coming at me in waves that evening. Women I knew. Women I didn't know. Women who weren't really women hoping I was drunk enough not to care. Women who wanted big money. Women who wanted any money. Women who were so fucked up they probably didn't even know whether they were buying or selling. I had resisted all comers with my iron will, though the rust was setting in a bit. I had sat there drinking with friends. Then when the friends had gone their own ways, to wives, and whores, and girlfriends, I drank with some of the women left behind. Then, when those women tired of the game and left, I drank with the staff who lived on wages and small tips. Then, when they started packing up to give way to the day staff, I figured the time had come for me to stop drinking. It was a painful thought, but everyone has to stop drinking sometime. Even Frankie.

I love Patpong by dawn. It has all the magic of a circus when the show has ended. I walked slowly, and appreciatively, towards Suriwong. At dawn, especially on Sunday, the tuk-tuk drivers on Suriwong no longer quoted excessive prices. They just wanted a last quick fare before the end of time. On the way a few Katoeys made attempts to interest me from their all night party house at the kickboxing bar. "Hey. Handsome man. Where are you going ?"

"Home"

"I'll come with you."

"I don't have any money"

"Goodbye handsome man."

The tuk-tuk hadn't seemed particularly optimistic about getting my fare. I had approached him and asked him how much to get to Khao San Road. He looked fucked by whiskey, but I figured you had to die of something, and climbed in as soon as he agreed to forty baht.

Khao San Road always looks like a place clearing up after an Earthquake. Everybody is trying to sell some shit they found. "Shit. Lot's of lovely shit. Ah sir. This shit would suit you just fine."

"No. Thanks, I really don't need any shit right now."
"But this is top quality shit."

"No. Sorry. I've got more shit than I can handle."

"I can do you a good price. This shit and this shit thrown in for free. Five hundred baht."

"Sorry. I know it's you're business and all but have you ever thought of selling something other than shit."

"But shit's been in my family for generations."

"You ever sell any."

"Of course. I sell shit every day. Farang love Thai shit. This is real Thai shit. It's not Indian or Chinese. Hundred percent Thai. Great quality. The best shit in the world."

"You see the thing is, I hate shit. I hate the look of it. I hate the smell of it. I hate the hovering flies. I hate everything about it. I don't want any shit."

"I tell you what. If you buy this shit you can sleep with my sister. She won the Miss Thai shit pageant last year. See the photograph."

"How much did you say this shit was again ?"

Wading through the cheese cloth and tie-dye wearing farang, and the endless choruses of Bob Marley's Buffalo Soldier, I went into the chemist and bought myself a bottle of M-150. The only way to open a bottle of M-150 is by clenching the aluminium cap between your teeth and twisting the bottle with a jerk. This always leaves your teeth tingling, and tasting of metal, but once you knock back the ice cold syrupy liquid you can usually feel your vital organs being made that bit more vital. After hitting this bottle about fifty percent of your potential hangover is usually quashed. Feeling slightly more human I sat in one of the guest house restaurants that spilled out on to the street. My fellow customers all seemed young and excited. They were making plans to hit the jungles and ride on elephants. Their eyes gleamed with Joe Cummings style traveller ethics. God bless them, I thought. They had their rough guides and their traveller's survival kits. They had inexact maps of Thailand that opened up to wallpaper size. They made marks in their books and on their maps planning their itineraries. I wondered how old they were. Were they that much younger than me?

I was thirty, and I spent my time surrounded by hookers, and hucksters, and con men, and junkies. My idea of a Thai holiday would not have impressed the guys at the Tourist Authority of Thailand one little bit. I loved the idea of travelling and seeing the cultural and religious artefacts of a great country. It's just that I had been diverted. Yeah. Diverted. Ah fuck. What was I doing here ? I'd been involved in all this strange shit. I'd fallen in deep. The girls had taken me to worlds that had really screwed around with my brain. Witchdoctors and shamen who offered their souls up for temporary possession by the spirits of dead monks. Drunken catfights that no man could have broken up. Thermae fights where heads got busted. Women who loved, and hated, with an intense passion, only to forget within days. Expats drinking themselves miserably to death, while living a life that most men in my own country would envy. Girlfriends who gave me diseases, and slept with other men for money. Women whose wrists looked like maps of San Francisco, crisscrossed with tramline scars. Women who went crazy in the middle of the night, and thought I was there to kill them, and shouted that they needed somebody to come and save them. It was all too much. But my fellow Khao San Road dwellers were strangely untouched by all of this. To them the slum houses were awful, but in a pleasantly detached and picturesque way. The prostitution of Thailand was a fascinating, but sad, condition of third world poverty that had nothing to do with their lives. They'd probably all visit Patpong once and shake their heads at the sadness of it all.

The smiling waitress brought me the breakfast special. Badly cooked bacon, deep fried eggs, dodgy sausages, toast, pineapple jam, and a yellowing pot of butter. I started eating, and started to feel very sick indeed. Suddenly I couldn't face going back to the heat of my box size room. I ate half of what was on the plate, paid up and left.

The music in the street was pounding in my head. Now Michael Jackson and Guns and Roses had joined in the war for loudest noise. Speakers advertised their ability to bust eardrums.

The sun was blaring it's white light.

I noticed every farang I passed in the street smelled really bad. Was that how I smelled ? They seemed to smell of cheeseburgers with halitosis sauce. And they were all too big. Their skin looked like rubber. Even the semi-dressed multi-pierced fit farang women had a dead look about their eyes. And, what was worse, they all kept bumping into me. And I was starting to feel very groggy.

I noticed a girl whose lobster pink burned face hung slack jawed and fish-eyed. Her dead, cold, pale grey, sunstroke eyes made me feel even sicker. Oh fuck. I thought. I really have to get away from here. Israeli tourists were shouting at each other in their glottal language. "Ghlagghi. Ghofughhi. Flaghhalaghh." It was the sort of noise English school kids made when working on a particularly viscous gob of spit to be cast at an enemy.

I quickly slipped off the main strip and down an alley between an exchange bureau and a shop with rows of tacky looking leather belts and handbags stacked outside. There were three small plates on the ground, with rice soaked in aromatic fish sauce. Several mangy looking kittens ate the rice eagerly, fooled by the smell of dead anchovies into thinking this was a proper meal. An old Chinese woman, barely visible through clouds of smoke, was cooking up some stir fry that smelled strangely toxic to me. Whiny Chinese music echoed loudly from her little shop, resounding through every corner of my head, like fingernails down a blackboard. As I walked past I looked into a very small dark guest house restaurant, filled with rows of farang wearing pink and orange, gormlessly staring at a TV set in the corner, while cockroaches darted around their sandaled feet. The show was one they'd probably seen a million times before. Rambo was killing gooks again, or was it russkies ?

I walked on, and trod carefully over a wooden rampart, over a deep, and thick looking, black puddle. A sewer smell hit me like a sock in the jaw. It must have been where the guy selling shit kept all his stock. I kept walking over broken concrete and pebbles.

And suddenly it seemed clean. A big, well tended, green garden behind ornate looking iron grating met the end of the alley and the corner of a soi parallel to Khao San Road. There were school kids in their crispy white shirts, and coal black shorts and skirts. They walked playfully along the soi, boys holding hands with boys, girls holding hands with girls. All with complete innocence that seemed a million miles from the confusion of nationalities jammed into Khao San Road. A billion miles from the madness of the bars and Bangkok hookers. I wondered if my busy girlfriend, whose mind kept slipping into dark paranoia, and whose conversation was peppered with confused lies, had ever been like these children. The tinkling theme tune to The Godfather filled the air. This was met with a joyous scream. Some of the kids started running in the direction of the small ice cream van. Others, with studied confidence, kept walking slowly, because they knew there'd be ice cream enough for all of them, and then some. I saw the first kids descend on the van laughing with that same kind of unbridled happiness of kids running into the sea, or up to some fairground attraction. And something else. I noticed my own pace quickening as I walked towards the van. Hell. I wanted an ice cream. Most of the kids already had their ice creams by the time I got there, and they laughed at seeing this fully grown farang rummaging about in the ice cream cart like another kid. I laid my hands on a lemon and orange sherbet whiz bang. Eight baht. This was one of the expensive ones.

As I sat on a step outside somebody's high walled home, and peeled back the wrapper stuck with ice to the lolly, I felt a bit like an animal at a zoo. But, like an animal at a zoo, I was much more concerned with what I had in my hand than I was in anybody watching. I took my first bite, and the flavours dissolved and exploded on my tongue like an angel cleaning away everything evil from my soul. I looked back at the kids and they hid behind each other and giggled. This was a beautiful place. And the heat was beautiful. And the people were beautiful. I didn't need all the bullshit to enjoy this town. I didn't need mad girlfriends, or sitting out on Patpong all night, with the drinking, and naked women, and loud music. Hell. All I needed was a lemon and orange sherbet whiz bang.

And somewhere during that ice lolly my hangover and nausea disappeared, and I saw something of my true nature.