I went looking for four quiet days in Bangkok. I came back planning to move near Edinburgh for a 47-year-old woman.

I went back to Thailand in late April, fancying another round of adventures before the real heat set in. I'm 43, from Cardiff, and this time everything went a lot smoother than my last trip, none of the messes I got myself into before.

Before catching the flight I'd already spent a few weeks talking to a girl online, Mint, and we agreed to spend four days together in Bangkok as soon as I landed. Four days, not one more, we made that clear from the first message so there'd be no confusion further down the line.

Mint had energy that didn't let up from minute one. She messaged me constantly, telling me what she was up to, sending photos of her food, asking what time my flight landed as if she'd be waiting at the gate with a sign. When we finally met in person at the airport, that energy didn't drop off at all, if anything it went up.

We spent the four days working through markets, eating at street stalls she insisted on picking personally because "tourists never find the good ones," and staying out late around Sukhumvit laughing at pretty much everything, from my accent butchering Thai to the heat that left me drenched while it didn't seem to touch her at all. One evening we went up to a rooftop bar just to see the city lit up, and she spent half an hour pointing out buildings and telling me stories she was probably making up on the spot. It was a far better start to the trip than I'd expected.

One of those days we took the boat down the river to Wat Arun at sunset, and Mint insisted on stopping for mango sticky rice from a vendor who, according to her, was "the only good one in all of Bangkok," a line she repeated about at least half a dozen different stalls over the four days. I believed it a little less each time and enjoyed it a little more each time, if I'm honest.

The last night I'd booked us a trip out to Ayutthaya, thinking it would be the perfect way to close out the four days before I carried on alone to Pattaya. The problem was Mint had understood we were staying two nights instead of one, and talking to her among the temple ruins I pieced together that she'd actually been hoping to come along with me to Pattaya afterwards, as if the four days had just been the opening act to something longer. That was never on the table. We'd agreed on four days from the very first message we exchanged, and I reminded her as gently as I could, the two of us sitting on a bench in front of one of the chedis.

She didn't take it well. Her eyes filled up with tears right there in the temple courtyard, Japanese tourists walking past behind her taking photos as if nothing was going on. She stayed like that for most of the afternoon, and was still low when I got in the taxi to the bus station heading for Pattaya. Oddly enough she kept messaging me for a while afterwards as if nothing had happened, asking how the trip was going, sending photos of her day, the same energy as always, as though that afternoon in Ayutthaya had never taken place.

Pattaya was a good laugh from the first moment. In a bar near the beach I met a girl called Gift, out on her day off and considerably better looking in person than her photos suggested, which doesn't happen all that often in that town. We got talking for a good while, her telling me about her hometown up in Isaan and me trying not to come across as just another dull farang. She ended up paying for a couple of rounds and the motorbike taxi over to Walking Street, which I hadn't been expecting at all and thanked her for between laughs.

There she introduced me to a friend of hers, a British girl who'd been working in the area a couple of years, and it came out in conversation that she lived barely twenty minutes from my place in Cardiff, practically on the street where I went to school. We had a good laugh at the coincidence, two Welsh people meeting in a bar on Walking Street ten thousand kilometres from home, comparing pubs and streets we'd both known our whole lives while Gift looked on, not following half of what we were saying.

From Pattaya I took a day trip to Si Racha to meet up with a Filipino girl, Angel, who I'd also been chatting with before the trip. We sat in a restaurant looking out over the water and she spent a good chunk of the afternoon talking about her best friend, a Thai woman she'd known for seventeen years, who'd suddenly blocked her on everything, Line, Facebook, Instagram, with no explanation beforehand. Angel still couldn't work out what had happened and kept coming back to it between courses.

I was more curious than I probably should have been. I asked for the friend's name out of curiosity and messaged her myself that same night just to see what she was like, no real intention behind it beyond killing time. Her name was Aew, and she turned out to be far more good fun than I'd expected from someone who'd apparently just cut off her lifelong best friend without a word of explanation. We talked late into that night about nothing in particular, and kept messaging over the next two days while I was still in Pattaya.

She lived five minutes from Bangkok airport, which worked out perfectly since my trip was already winding down. I ended up leaving Pattaya a day early just to spend more time with her, something I hadn't planned doing for anyone else the whole trip, and didn't even mention to Mint when she messaged that afternoon asking how things were going.

When I turned up at her place I was expecting something close to the conversations we'd had over Line, funny, no-nonsense, with that slightly dry sense of humour she'd already made clear over text. I got all of that and a fair bit more. She laughed at my half-packed suitcase, made me tea before I'd even said I wanted any, and within the hour had me feeling like I'd been coming round for months rather than hours.

Aew is 47, quite a bit older than me, but I've always got on well with older Thai women. They tend to have more life experience and considerably better English than a lot of the younger crowd, who can seem more glued to their phones than to the conversation in front of them. With Aew I could talk about real things, her kids, my job, why I'd come back to Thailand after last time, without that feeling of just filling silences.

She's got three teenage kids living in Scotland with her ex-husband, who's Scottish. She's already got her UK visa sorted, has done for months, and a flight booked to go see her family in Edinburgh soon, something she'd been organising on her own long before I turned up in her life.

During my last few days there she looked after me in a way I wasn't expecting. She cooked for me every night, dishes that took hours to make, without me ever asking, and wouldn't take a single baht in return at any point, even though it's obvious she doesn't have much spare herself. Before I left she introduced me to some of her family, aunts and cousins who came round on a Sunday for rice and fried fish out on her terrace, and they all seemed to take a liking to me almost straight away, laughing at my clumsy Thai and piling more food on my plate than I could ever finish while her mother looked me up and down without saying a great deal.

The plan now is to drive up to Edinburgh while she's there, spend a few days together on neutral ground, so to speak, and maybe have her come stay in Cardiff for a while after that, a few months to see how things go living in the same place properly rather than just on holiday. I've even started looking into teaching English out there if things keep going the way they are. It's not the wage that changes your life, but I don't need much to be happy.

None of this was on the cards when I booked the flights back in late April. I went looking for four quiet days in Bangkok and a week on the beach in Pattaya, and I've come back with plans to visit Scotland and a date in the calendar I had no idea was going to exist. I still hear from Mint now and then, short messages spaced well apart, no hard feelings on either side by the look of it. I talk to Aew every single day. Who knows, there might be another part to this story before too long.