I threw up on the pavement outside a hotel in Phuket at one in the morning. A stranger sat with me until sunrise and wouldn't take a single baht for it.

I'd been divorced five years and working for three of them as if work were the only thing that still depended on me.

I was 42, running a family business in Beirut more or less on my own, with a schedule that didn't tell Monday from Sunday. It wasn't unhappiness exactly. It was the absence of anything else.

My friend Karim had been to Thailand twice and wouldn't let it go. The first time he mentioned it, at a business dinner that ran too long, I let it pass like one of those things people say and forget. The second time he showed up with photos already loaded on his phone. The third time he planted himself in front of me, literally between the main course and coffee, and said: "Book two weeks. Don't think about it. Just book it." He repeated it so many times over so many dinners that on some random Thursday, more to shut him up than out of any real conviction, I opened my laptop at the office, well past midnight, and bought a flight to Bangkok before I could talk myself out of it.

I had no plan. One hotel booked, a vague idea of covering Bangkok, Phuket, and Pattaya, and the strange feeling of doing something I hadn't fully decided to do.

Bangkok greeted me with the most pleasant chaos I'd ever seen. I left the hotel that first morning thinking it would be easy to find my way: I memorized a 7-Eleven on the corner as my landmark. Half an hour later I understood my mistake. There's a 7-Eleven on every corner in Bangkok. Literally every one.

I was lost within the hour.

A tuk-tuk driver offered to take me back toward what I thought was my hotel's neighborhood, with a smile a little too wide, which at the time I read as pure friendliness. He charged 400 baht for a ride that shouldn't have cost half that. I paid without arguing, more relieved to recognize an intersection than annoyed about the price. When I had to go out again that same afternoon and found the exact same intersection, I took a metered taxi instead: 70 baht, nearly the identical route. I learned the lesson faster than expected, and for the rest of the trip I only got into taxis with the meter running.

Bangkok, with its golden temples, its impossible traffic, and its street food on every block, felt like a place built for getting lost on purpose, and for a couple of days I let it happen. I ate things I couldn't pronounce, haggled badly at a night market, and lost count of how many temples I visited. But after a few days I flew on to Phuket, bag in hand and expectations considerably lower, with no idea that's where I'd end up experiencing the thing I'd actually remember from that trip.

I hired a guide for the first few days: the Phi Phi Islands at sunrise, before the tour boats arrived en masse, the Big Buddha on the hill, a temple overlooking the Andaman Sea I could still describe with my eyes closed. The guide, an older man named Somsak who spoke an English full of mistranslated Thai proverbs, told me every morning that Phuket "has two faces, like everything does" — the one the resort tourist sees, and the one he'd known since he was a boy. In the evenings, once he dropped me at the hotel, I'd walk into Patong for a simple dinner and to watch the town wake up in its other, neon-lit way, without much interest in the bar scene, just watching.

The last day of the tour went wrong from the start. The boat was delayed by rough water, Somsak apologized like it was his fault, and traffic back from the pier was worse than usual — a full hour stuck watching motorbikes weave between the cars. I got back to the hotel past seven in the evening, completely wiped out, still with sand between my toes and wanting nothing but a shower and a bed. Too tired to get dressed again and go out for dinner like the previous nights, I ordered rice and shrimp from the hotel restaurant by phone and ate it sitting on the bed, still in my beach clothes, barely chewing.

Thirty minutes later I started shaking. Cold, a cold that made no sense with the air con off and thirty degrees outside. I lay down thinking sleep would fix it.

I slept a couple of hours and woke up drenched in sweat, feeling worse than before I'd fallen asleep.

It was a non-smoking room, so I went down around one in the morning for a cigarette and a cup of tea, with the vague idea that fresh air might help. I took a couple of sips of the tea.

I started vomiting on the pavement in front of the hotel, with no warning at all. Food poisoning, no question.

A young woman who worked at a nearby spa was walking home at that hour and recognized me — she'd seen me coming and going from the hotel all week. She ran over and asked what was wrong. I gestured at the pavement with my free hand and told her she could see perfectly well for herself.

Her name was Nid.

She asked for my room number, pointed me to a chair by the hotel entrance, and told me to wait there. Then she disappeared.

She came back about twenty minutes later from a nearby 7-Eleven with stomach medicine, rehydration salts, a bottle of milk, and some plain crackers. She made me take all of it, one thing after another, refusing to accept no for an answer, and sat with me on that chair until seven in the morning.

We didn't talk much at first, between retching and awkward silences. I apologized more than once for what she was witnessing; she laughed, not unkindly, and told me she'd seen far worse working in Patong, that a Middle Eastern man throwing up shrimp didn't exactly impress her. Once my stomach started to settle a little, we talked about all sorts of things: Beirut, my family's business, why I'd traveled alone. I told her about the divorce without going into detail, and she nodded like she didn't need more explanation. She told me she'd been working at the spa for a couple of years, that she sent part of her salary home to her family every month, that she missed her village in the northeast but that Phuket had more opportunity than home did. At some point that night I stopped feeling like a sick tourist and just started feeling, simply, accompanied.

When the sun finally came up and she saw I could stand without getting dizzy, she walked me to my room door, made sure I could shower without falling, and waited outside until I called out that I was fine. Then she left straight for the spa to open up for her morning cleaning shift, as if she hadn't just spent the entire night sitting on a plastic chair looking after a stranger who'd been throwing up in the street.

I tried to give her money before she left. She refused without hesitating, almost offended I'd offered. I tried again, this time just to cover what she'd spent at the 7-Eleven, nothing more. She refused again, just as firmly, and told me she was glad I felt better and that she had to get to work.

We've stayed in touch ever since. At first it was occasional messages asking how I'd gotten home, whether my stomach had fully recovered. Then came holiday photos, New Year's messages, the odd meme she'd send out of nowhere. Over time it became years marked by small updates: that she'd changed spas, that her mother had been sick, that she'd finally saved enough to move back to her village. Today she helps her mother run a small shop in northeastern Thailand — a bit of everything, instant noodles to phone top-up cards — and every so often she still messages me on my birthday. In nine years, she's never once asked me for anything. Not a loan, not an elaborate excuse, not even when I directly asked if she needed help with something.

In nine years of trips to Thailand since that night I've seen plenty of everything else. I've met people who only saw a wallet with legs when they looked at me. I've heard stories from friends who lost thousands of dollars to women who turned out to have three foreign boyfriends at once. I've learned to be wary of sick buffaloes, brothers' motorbikes that never existed, and visa agents who vanish with the money. Thailand has that side too, and it would be naive to pretend it doesn't.

But when I think of Thailand, the first image that comes to mind isn't any of that.

It's a stranger sitting on a plastic chair by the pavement outside a hotel in Phuket, staying with a sick man until the sun came up, who refused to take a single baht I tried to give her.

That's the Thailand I keep going back to.