I will miss a great deal about Thailand. It may be clichéd to say that Thailand is "the country with the smile", but it's true - if you smile, everyone, almost without exception, beams back at you. It's as if the whole nation is cheerful. Maybe it's the sunshine.

Sanuk is supposed to be the key to Thai behaviour - anything worth doing must have an element of fun. And so it is; people laugh and joke with each other in a way I think it would be hard to find in many other countries. Even bargaining is done with a great deal of fun and overacting.

I have taken it for granted that there are huge gold-covered temples around every corner and the saffron-covered monks and white-covered nuns that you see everywhere seem completely normal. Even everyone stopping dead at 6pm everyday to stand for the national anthem has lost its novelty.

I will miss the very characteristic Thai folk/pop music that blares out in Bangkok and other cities. I bought some in Ayuthaya but as I don't have a CD player I don't actually know what I've got yet! I'll miss the language too, which sounds far more musical in its use of tones than Mandarin or Cantonese.

In the end, although I spent a month in Thailand, I never made it to a beach, let alone The Beach. But beaches are just a small one-dimensional aspect to Thailand - it has many other interesting directions, and anyway I can do the beaches when I come next time!

Next stop Hong Kong. Hope I can afford the Internet charges!