I expected Petchaburi to be a tourist center like the previous two towns we visited. It's not. It's a pretty normal Thai town with an unusual number of temples.

We are generally not temple people. This sounds terrible but in Thailand you can stop every five or 10 km to look at some temple. We only stop if a temple has some particular fascination and we have nothing else to do or if after passing a few score of temples we get tourist guilt.

Petchaburi literally has a temple on every block. Since we arrived early we took a walking tour described by our guide book. Here's my description of the tour (it explains why we aren't temple people): The first temple was inside locked gates so we didn't see anything. The second temple had some impressive old volcanic stone buildings but needed a better landscape architect. The buildings were originally built as Hindu temples 1,000 years ago but these particular temples were converted to Buddhism simply by putting a Buddha inside. We skipped the third temple because it was too far away and we were getting tired of dodging cars to walk down the street. Inside the fourth temple, which we approached by walking through a game of basketball, sat three Buddhas of diminishing size, from 20 feet tall to life size. The lighting was well done and I was suitably awed despite the basketball game right out front.

Team Swiss stayed at the same hotel and we had dinner with them at a nice little restaurant on the river.

The accommodation was the worst we've had so far in Thailand but was sufficient. The rooms of the hotel were connected by a shared balcony that looked over the river. We had one window and it opened onto the balcony too.

The window had a screen and big wooden shutters. We thought about closing the shutters before going to bed but it was too hot so we left them open.

Sometime in the night a light on the balcony went on and flooded our room with a dim glow, illuminating us as we slept. I woke up hearing Joan yell, "Go away!" A man stood outside our window looking in and smoking a cigarette. Even as Joan yelled he just stood there for a few seconds. Finally as she kept yelling and waving her arms he wandered off. A minute later he was back. We yelled him away again and he left slowly with an unconcerned smile on his face.

That was creepy. A Peeping Tom and he didn't even run when caught. We closed the shutters after that and neither of us went back to sleep for a long time.

First in Sarawak (see Borneo chaps) five policemen wake us up in the middle of the night. Then in Chumpon (see earlier Thailand chapter) a kid mistakes us for his girlfriend at 3:50 a.m. Now in Petchaburi a Peeping Tom. We've got to start getting more careful about where we sleep.

The rooms at the hotel had another odd feature. To lock them when you went out, you put a padlock on the outside of the door. Joan figured the Peeping Tom was in the room next to ours since it was the only room where you would have to pass our window to get to it. In the morning Joan put that room's padlock through the door, though she did not lock it. (Joan: I was too chicken. If I had known it was his room for sure, I would have locked it. But since I wasn't sure I figured I'd take a chance and at least greatly inconvenience the guy. Whoever was in there probably had to take their window screen off and stretch their arm outside to pull the padlock out of the door latch).

We left at 6 a.m. to catch the train to Bangkok so we never did find out what happened. We told the hotel proprietors but they had no idea who it was.

I dreaded dealing with buying the train tickets and getting our bikes on board but it turned out to be pretty easy. The only odd thing was they told us to stand 50 meters past the end of the platform. This put us in a narrow strip of rubble and railroad ties between the tracks and a road. But it was the right place. The baggage car stopped immediately in front of us.

Next: Bangkok

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