I asked to see her passport and every excuse in the book came out. That's when everything turned.

My name's Dave, I was 35, from a town near Manchester, and I was freshly out of a relationship that had ended by text message, no warning at all, on some ordinary Sunday night. Four weeks before that we'd found out she was pregnant, so I went from picturing a whole life with her to being completely alone within the space of a month. I was in pieces, no exaggeration, barely managing more than work and home and back again.

My nephew and a mate, both called Paul, which caused constant confusion whenever the three of us were together, came round one evening with a couple of beers, unannounced, told me they had a trip to Thailand booked already, had done for months, and said flat out I should come along. I didn't want to go anywhere at that point in my life, least of all halfway round the world, but somehow, beer by beer that same night, I ended up booking the same flight for two weeks later, barely noticing the exact moment I'd said yes to any of it.

I'd never been abroad before. Never been on a plane in my life. The two Pauls told me about temples and hot weather, but left out quite a lot of other details along the way, on purpose as I understood later.

I packed jeans, a jumper, and a coat, exactly what you'd take on any normal trip out of England. They packed shorts and t-shirts, and smiled the whole flight over saying that thing about "what happens in Thailand stays in Thailand." I had no idea what they meant by it, not the faintest clue.

We landed in Bangkok around 10pm, early April, and walked straight outside into the heat. I went running to the toilets and changed immediately, already sweating just from crossing the terminal.

By midnight we were in a taxi heading to Pattaya, with the two Pauls giving the driver directions in a tone that made it pretty clear this wasn't their first time making that trip, telling him to head straight to Walking Street without stopping at the hotel first. I got out of that taxi and my eyes nearly fell out of my head, neon lights everywhere, music pouring out of every open doorway, people everywhere at that hour of the night. I had never seen anything like it in my life, not remotely, not even on television.

First night I ended up meeting a woman I thought at the time just really liked me. Next morning she asked for a fairly generous tip and I thought, naively, that she wanted taxi money to get home.

At breakfast I mentioned it without thinking much of it and the two Pauls fell about laughing at the table. Apparently this was another thing they'd forgotten to mention before the trip.

The trip was genuinely full of great memories, I have to say. One night I got obsessed with a game of Jenga in a bar and ended up beating the all-time record for the place. The whole bar erupted. My picture went up on the wall, and my nephew confirmed a year later it was still there, exactly where they'd put it.

Another night someone challenged me to eat some tiny chilies sold in a little bowl by the bar, thinking they'd be mild because they were so small, barely the size of a fingernail. They were not mild, not even close. My lips swelled up within seconds, I was sweating like never before in my life, and I was completely convinced my head was about to explode, literally, no exaggeration whatsoever. The staff noticed straight away I was in real distress and brought me some kind of milk drink without being asked, something I later found out worked far better than water ever would. I've never been more grateful for anything in my life than that one glass of milk.

I met a girl everyone called A and we spent the entire last week together, barely apart, eating together, walking the beach in the evenings once the heat eased off, laughing at my nonexistent Thai. She never asked me for money directly, just the daily fine to leave the bar so she could go out with me that night, something that seemed reasonable to me then and still does now. When I left she came to the airport with her whole family waiting there right by the entrance, sizing me up in broken English between the lot of them, trying to work out who I was in a matter of minutes. She cried properly when I walked away towards passport control, and I wasn't entirely sure of myself either.

Back in the UK I found out I still had ten days holiday left unused. I booked another flight for the following month almost without thinking it through. When I arrived, A was waiting at the airport and said I could stay at her place to save on a hotel.

Nothing could have prepared me for what that actually meant: one completely bare room aside from the bare essentials, all her belongings stuffed into plastic bags scattered across the floor instead of a wardrobe, not a single piece of recognisable furniture, no air conditioning in the middle of April, a thin mattress laid straight on the concrete floor. I woke up the next day covered in mosquito bites from head to toe, counting them almost out of curiosity in the shower. I stayed anyway, several days longer than I'd originally planned, because I genuinely liked her a lot and didn't want it to be over yet.

We started talking about getting her a visa to come to the UK. Somehow I ended up sitting in some office filling out visa paperwork and leaving a fairly substantial deposit.

She told me she had a passport of her own, something I didn't question at the time, and I asked to see it one day without making a big thing of it. Every excuse in the book came out, it was at her mother's house, she'd left it somewhere else, why did I even need to see it anyway when it was already being processed. While she was in the shower one afternoon, I looked for it myself among the plastic bags, feeling bad about it but unable to stop. The passport had stamps that didn't line up with anything she'd told me, and among them, six months spent in Paris two years earlier, something she'd never mentioned once in all that time. When I confronted her the moment she stepped out of the bathroom, she said a friend had borrowed it after losing her own, an explanation that didn't seem to convince even her as she said it.

I told her, as calmly as I could manage in the moment, that I needed space to think it all through and was going to stay somewhere else that night, just that one night, nothing final yet. That's exactly when everything turned, with no transition at all. She went completely off, throwing things around the room, bottles, clothes, whatever was closest to hand, swinging at me several times, trying to hurt me any way she could think of in that instant. I grabbed what I could in a hurry, wallet, passport, not much else, and got out while she screamed things I didn't fully understand and threw objects down the hallway after me as I ran for the street.

I cancelled the visa application the next morning, my hands still shaking a little. Spent my entire last day holed up in a hotel, barely stepping outside.

Back in England I had plenty of time to think it all over.

Trying to turn a girl you meet in a bar on Walking Street into something real rarely works, and there are enough stories out there, told by people who've been through exactly the same thing, to confirm that again and again without a shadow of doubt. I won't make that mistake again, I'm completely sure of that now. But Thailand itself, as a country, I fell completely in love with, no reservations whatsoever, the temples, the food, the ordinary people I met outside the bars, and I'll be going back the moment I can properly organise it.

The two Pauls could have warned me about a few things before we got on that plane, about the tips, about the bar fines, about pretty much all of it really. But honestly, would I have gone at all if they had?