A Shrimp is dancing in my oesophagus. Or pharynx. In my throat somewhere, anyway. No one said to crunch it up first. So it's still alive. And it's dancing. I take a big swig of beer, trying to wash it down, make it drunk, drown it, anything. This spurs it on to a frenzy of activity. I've swallowed the world's one and only kick-boxing shrimp. And he's angry.
Right, you little bastard, that's it. If I can't get you, I'm going to take it out on your family. So I spoon in mouthful after mouthful of Kung Ten (literally, dancing shrimps - live shrimps, made hopping mad by plunging them into lemon juice and chilli) and crunch them up. Swallowing hard, I bombard my kick-boxing friend with his pulverised relatives. Between mouthfuls, I swig at my bottle, showering him with ice-cold beer. The kicking eases off, he gives a final right hook, followed by a little twitch, before sliding down to join his friends in the shrimp graveyard that my stomach has become. And I collapse in a heap of sweaty hiccups.
As if the experience isn't terrible enough, I also have to endure the mirth of the women who've served me, and the taunts of my friend, Andrew, who's gone all save-the-shrimp on me. Never, ever, accept dancing shrimps if you're offered them. It's not worth it. Just say no.
My shrimps once danced in the Mekong River, one of the 12 great rivers in the world. The Mekong rises in the Tibet Plateau in China, then flows through Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam - 4,500 kilometres in all. About halfway through its journey, the Mekong slides past Benjarong's guest house in Chiang Khan. Benjarong's teak verandah is ideal for Mekong-gazing, and dawn is prime viewing time. It's like watching TV, first with the colour and sound turned down.
As the sun comes up, the colour is slowly turned up: the river turns from black through grey and silver to brown. The wooded hills of Laos on the other side go green, the boats are coloured in, a group of young monks, their robes now glorious saffron, wanders along the bank for a swim.
The sound, too, is turned up: a crowing cock breaks the silence of the river, a dog barks, the outboard of a long-tailed boat is started. With the warm glow of fresh sunrays on your face and the smell of Benjarong making coffee and eggs, the sensory experience is complete.
This is Isaan, in the north-east of Thailand, much less visited than the rest of the country, but probably fast filling up with annoying people like us who crave the unspoilt but, in going there, help spoil it.
People go to Thailand to roast on the beaches of the south. They go shopping and f***ing in Bangkok, and trekking in the hills of the north, where they smoke opium with the chiefs of hill tribes. All very nasty. We are following the Mekong, not by canoe or steam boat as it should have been, but by Toyota Corona. Swiftly down the Mekong. And swiftly down the Mekong in every sense - as anyone who has ever had a hangover in Thailand will know - for Mekong is the name of Thailand's best-known "whisky", and when we arrive anywhere, it is downed, swiftly.
The flat plains and paddy-fields of the north-east are not spectacular, but that doesn't matter. It all seems quite real. And the towns along the Mekong are fun: Nong Khai, Beung Kan, Nakhon Phanom, That Phanom.
They have a lot in common: lots of power cables and aerials, wooden houses with a hint of Frenchness from over the river in Laos. (Laos, which looks beautiful and backward, was colonised by the French. Thailand was colonised by nobody). On the way into every town, that famous Buddhist, Richard Gere, smiles down from a large billboard. This marks the ubiquitous Isuzu Car Gallery - in Thailand, Isuzus are not just cars, they're art.
Our guide book says pretty much the same about all of the towns: not much to do except sip a beer and watch boats go back and forth to Laos. Not true. Why does the guide book send people to about 35 temples? Does the writer think all we want to do is visit temples? I don't mind the odd one, but there is more to life. Like snooker. Everywhere has a snooker hall. And karaoke. Nothing goes down better at a small-town karaoke bar than a couple of absurd, tall foreigners barking out Let It Be or My Way.
Every town also has what we came to know as a "cold dark bar". They're very cold - like walking into a fridge, except the light doesn't come on when you open the door. As well as being very cold, cold dark bars are very dark. So it takes a while to get adjusted to the light to find out what they're all about. A hand appears out of the blackness and leads you to a table, drinks arrive, and you are left to shiver. There are a few other people in the bar, and by happy coincidence, they all seem to be young girls.
One might go on stage and mime to a very bad pop song (all Thai pop music is gruesome), and then an older woman comes over to ask if we want to meet any of the girls. At which point we are overcome with shyness, bolt for the door, and go back to the karaoke.
In one town, the cold dark bar is even more extraordinary: colourfully and scantily clad girls dance behind a pane of glass. They wear coloured tags. It must be some local custom: the tropical fish game or something. An honour to witness.
Okay, I know. So it was a brothel. Think I'm stupid? Though there is no Bangkok ping-pong ball firing or unconventional bottle opening, prostitution is doing thriving in Thailand. There are around 200,000 prostitutes, and most Thai men visit them regularly. And, of course, so do tourists.
A charming Canadian we met in Ubon Ratchathani complained that it wasn't like it used to be, and that all the prostitutes were too old these days. By old, he meant in their 20s. For young girls you need to go to Cambodia. By young, he meant 14. And, of course, there's AIDS - for which our Canadian friend has a solution: "One thing you've got to remember, whip on that condom before they jump on you." What a sweet guy.
Driving a car around Thailand might sound adventurous but actually it's easy - except in Bangkok, where traffic moves so slowly that missing a turning can add hours to a journey. And if you're trying to go downtown, don't make the mistake I made of following signs to "Central City" (Central City is a large shopping mall, remarkable only for being a long way from the centre of Bangkok).
In the north-east, however, driving is a breeze. Roads are good, traffic is light and well-behaved, many signs are in English as well as Thai, and even when they're not, it can be amusing; there will be a sign saying something squiggly is in three kilometres. So, you can just turn off and find out what the squiggle means. It might be a temple, or a waterfall, a quarry even.
But it's not as exciting as Songkran. Songkran is the Thai new year, and it's far, far better than Auld Lang Syne and the off-chance of a snog. In Thailand, they celebrate new year by hurling water at each other. There is no escape - you get soaked. And drenching a foreigner is particularly excellent. So there's only one thing to do: join in. First step was to buy the largest pump-action water pistol, and then we cruised around blasting the hell out of pretty much anything that moved: unsuspecting shop-keepers, tuktuk drivers, slow agricultural types, animals, the odd German tourist.
When you go abroad it's always nice to take on board a little local flavour. So we Thaid-up our Toyota Corona: strings of jasmine hanging from the rear-view mirror, plastic flowers, incense, Buddhist scriptures. I even bought a small wooden cage of song birds at a temple which I was going to hang in the car, but Andrew got all animal-rightsy on me again and made me release them.
As with any road trip, it's important to get the sound-track right. We had Louis Armstrong for almost any time. And Hendrix for the odd Apocalypse Now moment, especially in deforested areas that look like they've been napalmed. Then there was opera and Oasis, both very loud, to remind ourselves that we weren't really in 'Nam, but just a couple of prats driving around Thailand.
Actually, we bought Oasis in one of the small, dusty towns by the Mekong. That's something else about Thailand: the combination of the familiar with the exotic. You can get What's The Story, Morning Glory? at the corner shop, you can stick your cash-point card into the wall to get money to pay for it, and Liverpool-Manchester United is on the telly. But just down the road is a man untangling his nets, just as men have on the banks of the Mekong for thousands of years.
His face is copper-coloured and heavily crevassed, and when you look into his eyes it's impossible to have any idea of what's going on inside his head. We have nothing in common. He is so foreign to me he doesn't even seem to be of the same species.
In years to come, there will be more prats driving around north-east Thailand in Toyotas. But the river won't notice - it will always be long and brown. On its banks, old men with craggy, copper faces will continue to untangle their nets and dream of the huge catfish that grow to 10 feet. And down in the murky depths, along with the huge catfish, I hope the shrimps will always dance.