Those 90 days fly past quite quickly and I find I need to pop across to Myanmar again, quite a worrying thought considering the shootings and stuff that happened during the brief period of civil unrest there a couple of months ago.

I had quite an eventful time actually, I jumped onto the night boat at 10pm and spent the night watching a few episodes of Lost on my Palm TX. This turned out to be a good idea because it meant I stayed awake all night instead of sleeping. They turn the lights off on the boat all night and you do not have seats you have beds, you are supposed to sleep through the journey. In the morning several people discovered passports, mobile phones, MP3 players and cash missing, every indication pointed at one of the boat crew being the thief, nothing of mine was stolen so I kept well out of the trouble and left everyone to it.

I met the fat woman on the pier, told her I needed to go to Ranong and she bundled me into a pickup and took me to her travel agency, only for me to discover that nobody else needed to go that day so they would not be running their regular minibus. I was forced to cough up for a private taxi all the way there and back which cost me £60, not a good start.

The taxi driver was cool though and it was a comfortable ride to Ranong, he took me to Thai immigration where I got my departure stamp and then asked me to wait 5 minutes. Shortly later a rather impressing Mercedes pulls into the car park, full factory conversion, dropped suspension, alloys the works, definitely a professional job done on it not a boy racer style bolt on bandit. He tells me to get into the Merc and I open the back door and see this extremely gorgeous girl sitting in the passenger seat. Turns out she is from Laos and also has to do a visa run.

We drive to the dock and get out of the Merc, usually you have to climb over lots of boats to get to the one you have rented and you share it with any people, goods or livestock they feel fit to cram aboard. Not this time though, we are given a boat to ourselves, the other boats are moved aside and ours is bought to the dock so we just step on. It’s about this time I start getting a little suspicious about the young lady I am travelling with. For a start she’s not dressed for it, in fact she’s dressed impeccably, looks like she’s off to the theatre or something. Secondly everybody keeps saying hello to her, waving and smiling like they know her. I’m getting winks and salutes off all the young boat guys cos’ they see me with her and reckon I must be her boyfriend, it’s all very odd.

So off we go over to Myanmar (Burma to the old folks) and do the business, still this odd stuff going on with the girl everywhere, then we come back across to Thailand and the soldiers actually get on the boat at the checkpoint, I’ve never even seen them move before let alone get on one of the boats and they start talking and joking with this girl. One of them uses searching my bag as an excuse to chat a little more and she tells him to stop it and get off the boat, which he damn well does!

By now I’m on good terms with this young lady as I lent her a sarong to put over her head so the sea spray doesn’t ruin her hair, I’ve also become a handy person at helping her on and off the boat, accompanied by more jeers and winks from the young guys working the boats. I really should have asked her who the hell she was before I said goodbye to her back at Thai immigration, it’s going to puzzle me all my life.

On the way back we find a group of lads who I met on the way across to Myanmar, they were on the boat next to me, their taxi has crashed quite spectacularly into a roadside village halfway across the mountains. None of them seem hurt and we offer them a life back to Surat Thani.

Finally I hop on the last Raja ferry home at about 5:30pm which puts me back on the island around 9:30pm, exactly 24 hours since I left. I swear I am never doing a visa run this way again, next time I’m taking the CBR again.

I just got back from my 90 day visa run to Myanmar (Burma to us old folks) a few days ago, it was quite a trip! I took my bike over on the ferry to Surat Thani and then did a 600km round trip to Ranong and back on the crazy Thai roads, pretty scary stuff at times!

On the way I took things easy but it took so long to make the journey that on the way back I pushed the envelope a little, had my baby sports bike cruising at 120kmph wearing just a pair of shorts and a crash hat. The resulting sun and wind burn was a bit nasty, my nose is still peeling much to Nuth’s amusement.

Crossing over to Myanmar was pretty funny, you just hop onto an old river boat and over you go, jump off, get your passport stamped and then back across to Thailand, I don’t suppose I spent more than 30 minutes out of the country!

The mountain road out of Ranong heading east is stunning though, on the way back I rode this road at midday, really cool thing to do, no traffic just long sweeping banked turns and stunning scenery, definitely the highlight of the entire trip.

My little bike is amazing, it may only be small but it has a huge heart and at 100kmph on this road it has the whole sports bike thing going on, amazingly good fun.

I also got to witness a pair of Thai frigates chasing a fishing boat on the way across to Surat Thani, this was pretty exciting to see but I lost sight of them before they caught it.