THEY appear at dusk every night, eerily illuminated along the curbs, only inches from the speeding pick-up trucks and motorbikes.

Gleaming bottles of ruby and amber are neatly lined up on little wooden tables so that harassed hubbies can grab a bottle on their way home.

The reds look like a new world Pinot Noir, and the ambers are possibly a fruity Chardonnay, or an austere Retsina.

But when you notice the bloke on the motorbike emptying one of the bottles into his gas tank, the penny drops.

The amber ‘vino’ is 91 octane and the ruby is the more potent 95 – just the thing to make any dinner party go off with a bang.

The ingenious Thais have discovered a crafty way around their government’s strange logic that if they close the fuel stations at 7pm, they will force people to save gas and do their bit in the fight against global warming.

Many things in Phuket aren’t always what they seem.

It’s a Friday night and a few beers in a bar not a million miles from Soi Bangla turns into a lot, and because you only rent beer, you feel an urgent need to return part of your purchase.

You stagger off in search of the bathrooms, and when you find them, they are in a pair, as you would expect, with one for the men and one for the girls.

Back home, the signs on the doors clearly indicate which doorway is best for you.

But in Thailand, this straightforward way of doing things is just a little too easy.

The pictures on these toilet doors are two, very similar, pony-tailed, pantaloon-wearing figures, so you still don’t know which door is which.

Then, just you reach desperation point, along comes a lifeline.

A long-legged stunner in a red mini-skirt breezes through one of the doors.

Clearly, yours is the other one, so in you go, only to be confronted by the screams and shouts of about a dozen startled and not very happy ladies. Oops!

In this confusing country, often the most beautiful ‘girls’ are ‘boys’, who line up with the blokes to relieve themselves.

Thailand so often confounds and confuses the newcomer, and then just as often she will resolve the confusion in a most charming way.

Down at the Easy Fitness Centre, they have three bathrooms which are clearly marked Male, Female and Ladyboy. Now that’s what you call true customer service.

“Treat yourself to a sauna and massage. You won’t regret it,” said my long-term expat mate soon after I first arrived on this idyllic island.

He was wrong. I did regret it.

I’d never been to a herbal sauna before, so it sounded like a good idea at the time.

I felt vulnerable as I changed into a flimsy cotton wrap and headed for the wood-fired sauna.

I collected a large tin mug full of cold water and plunged into the seething, swirling steam.

It’s hot in there, very hot.

And it takes a while for your eyes to adapt to all that steam.

After many seconds, my vision cleared and I took my seat, and suddenly realised there were six, rather large ladies in there as well.

They were arrayed around the tiled benches and seemed to be enjoying a huge joke at my expense.

There was a lot of nudging and giggling going on, and it was about then I noticed the blast of furnace-like steam which was cooking my meat and two veg.

My bum got redder and redder and the ladies’ laughter grew to a crescendo.

I dashed outside and poured lashings of icy water over my toasted nether regions, unaware that such pain existed outside of Guantanimo Bay.

But I’d learned my lesson. Never to take the only vacant seat in a packed Phuket herbal sauna.

That seat (it’s usually the first one on the right as you go in), is always vacant because it’s the one directly over the hot steam vent.

There is something of a gentler, saner, parallel universe here in the Andaman.

While superficial change steams through these islands, the underlying currents of life seem to remain traditional and immutable.

One morning, my daily dose of disasters on BBC World, was interrupted by a tumult of thudding coconuts hurtling to the ground.

The coconut men were busy culling the nuts with machetes as they hung among the palm fronds.

Their young sons were diligently collecting the grounded nuts, waiting for their turn to climb up into the coconut fronds, as generations have done before them.