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There was a wedding ring in my pocket.

Nittaya or Tak, the future Mrs Turner, would be waiting for me in a little under sixteen hours at a beer bar on Patpong 2. She wouldn't be alone. There would be friends, even family, waiting with her. If all went according to plan we would pile into a taxi that would take us to Amphur Suriwongse, a couple of blocks away, and there be committed to a lifetime of happiness.

But that was sixteen hours away.

I still had a chance.

Thanks to Thai ID cards having an expiry date Tak had been forced to take a little five day trip to her home town of Nong Khai. She'd invited me to go with her so I could be introduced, at great personal expense, to her family. I opted to remain, cheaply, in Bangkok. In 1991 you could live very cheaply in Bangkok. As long as you avoided the excesses of the bar scene, taxis and tuk tuks 250 baht was more than enough to live pretty well on. I could get up at whatever time I liked, stroll down Khao San Road and take a leisurely breakfast, before taking an epic walk in any direction I felt like taking. After getting lost a few times and stepping on the fringes of adventure I could then head back to Banglamphu to drink cheap beer, eat cheap food, and make cheap conversation with backpackers so cheap that they made me feel like the Sultan of Brunei.

And it was good.

Friends came and went. An old man stopped me in the street to warn me of the evils of Thai people; especially evil Thai women. Almost by accident I found myself in Sanaam Luang with a million people as the sky exploded above our head with fireworks more dazzling than any I'd seen in my life before. The world around me turned into a cheap party with singers and dancers and beer and food.

Late I'd usually head to Buddy's and have a drink or a coffee while watching the world go by. Buddy's bar and restaurant was half open to a narrow alleyway that snaked around it from a mouth in Khao San Road to its tail in an area which had some less reputable guest houses. If you got a good seat early on you could hang back of an evening and watch the two worlds collide.

Buddy's itself was a nice looking place. The furniture was eclectic but bended towards wicker backed chairs and ornately carved dark wood tables. Ceiling fans circulated the air and the smells from the kitchen. A twenty foot bar was stocked with a selection of liquors, spirits and even wines that put the best Sukhumvit area bars to shame. There was a surround sound system playing whatever was popular at the moment and The Eagles. And there was a large screen TV that showed the latest Hollywood blockbusters on laser disc. The waitresses were younger, friendlier and more flirtatious than the staff of other Khao San Road bars. There was one girl in particular who worked behind the bar with narrow eyes, perfect cheekbones, soft long hair and whose full sensual lips were eternally sucking at a bottle of Fanta through a long bendy straw who looked as though she'd stepped right out of the pages of some artily pornographic book about oriental beauty. Sometimes men would sit at the bar and try chatting her but she was like ice with all of them.

The clientele of Buddy's was varied. You'd get the odd older guy, who'd been in South East Asia for an age, going there to drink and, sometimes, talk about the past and Vietnam for the edification of the younger guys. You'd even get the odd weirdo and the odd artist. Not so many Thais. Travellers were the main customers though. Young travellers. The kind on their year's break between school and university or university and the real world. Some would sit around and order nothing while planning their travel itinerary according to a couple of cheap maps and Joe Cummings' Lonely Planet Guide as though they were in their mum's living room. Not all the travellers were bad. I made friends with plenty on their way to full moon parties on Kho Phangan or jungle treks in the Golden Triangle. You'd get the odd bit of travel snobbery where if you hadn't used a Kathmandu Kahzi you simply weren't worth knowing but for the most part they were open minded and easy-going.