I spent my last night in Bangkok with a waitress. Years later she was my boss in Phuket, and not the same person.

In 2009 the crash took my trade with it. I was a plasterer in Nottinghamshire, thirty years old, and almost overnight the building sites just stopped. There was no announcement, no letter, the phones simply stopped ringing and the builders I worked for went from "next week, definitely" to saying nothing at all. I ended up on night shifts in a factory with two old mates, Deano and Chris, stacking pallets and counting down to the weekend.

It was Deano who said it first, on a Friday in the pub, halfway through his third pint. Working holiday visas for Australia, a whole year away, and on the way, why not stop off in Thailand for a few weeks. Nobody argued much. Chris said yes before Deano had even finished the sentence. Two months later we had the flights booked and our notice handed in.

I landed in Bangkok with absolutely no idea what I was doing, a rucksack that still smelled of the shop, and the feeling that everyone except me knew how this place worked. We stayed near Khao San Road, which is where every first-time backpacker on the planet ends up, and we made every rookie mistake in the book. A man in an official-looking vest at the airport told us the licensed taxi counter was "closed for renovations" and put us in a minivan that charged three times the going rate. And then we fell for the classic that follows: a tuk-tuk driver insisted the temple we wanted was closed that day, but he knew "a better place" — which turned out to be a tailor's shop we had no intention of buying from — and from there, somehow, we ended up at a show none of us wanted to see, which cost a lot more than the price we'd been promised at the door.

Even so, it was a brilliant week. In the daytime we did the tourist rounds at no particular pace, the Grand Palace under a sun that showed no mercy, the golden temples, boats along the Chao Phraya canals with the engine coughing black smoke. At night we stayed out until sunrise around Khao San Road and came back to the hostel with our shoes caked in mud from some puddle we never identified, laughing about things I can't remember anymore.

Our last night in Bangkok we ate at a small place near Sukhumvit, the kind with plastic tables on the pavement and a fan turning over every one of them. We were served by a waitress called Fah. She was 24, spoke better English than I did, and laughed openly at our attempts to order the genuinely spicy food instead of the tourist-safe version. "That's not what you asked for earlier," she told us the second time she brought plates out, "this is what you actually wanted." When her shift finished we invited her out with us, more out of politeness than anything else, and she said yes without much thinking about it.

She stayed the whole night. Bars we don't remember the names of, a terrible karaoke session where Deano insisted on murdering something by Oasis, and a long conversation the two of us had sitting on a wall at four in the morning about nothing in particular — our families, why I'd dropped out of university, whether she'd ever get back to Bangkok. For the last night of a two-week first stop, it was a decent enough start to everything that came after.

The next day we flew to Koh Samui with a monumental hangover and badly zipped bags. Before we got in the airport taxi, Fah and I swapped Facebook details on her phone, which had a crack running across one corner of the screen. There were no promises, nothing that resembled a plan. Just a "let's see if we message" and a smile that stayed with me longer than I expected.

The weeks that followed were some of the best of my life up to that point. We island-hopped, Koh Samui, Phuket, Koh Phi Phi, chasing the full moon parties everyone kept talking about like they were following a badly drawn treasure map. We barely slept, spent as little as possible on shared fan rooms with no hot water, and every beach seemed better than the last. We ate wherever was cheapest, learned to haggle the boats between islands, and at some point I lost track of how many days we'd gone without checking the time. By the time we finally boarded the flight to Australia with the rest of the group, I already knew that wasn't going to be the last I saw of Thailand. What I didn't know was how much time I'd end up giving it.

In Australia I worked whatever came up. Fitting thermal insulation on new-build sites outside Melbourne, fibreglass getting into everything I wore, and a few months later a stint on a pearl boat off Darwin, humid heat that had nothing on Bangkok and twelve-hour days hauling oysters up off the seabed. Every time I scraped together a few days off and some spare cash, I'd check cheap flights back to Thailand. I went several times that year, almost always alone, almost always with the official excuse of "needing a few days on a beach." Fah and I kept messaging on and off through Facebook, short messages, nothing that had a name yet.

When the visa ran out I flew home to the UK with a lot less in the account than I'd left with. I spent a while working whatever I could find, saving every pound, moving back in with my parents in Nottinghamshire to avoid paying rent. As soon as I'd scraped enough together, I packed the bag again, this time on my own, and crossed Vietnam and Laos end to end, overnight buses and endless land borders, before crossing back into Thailand.

By then Fah wasn't in Bangkok anymore. She'd moved to Phuket and opened her own travel shop, a small office near Chalong with two desks, a laminated map on the wall and a fan that made more noise than air. We met up to catch up, and at some point in that conversation, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned she needed someone who could speak English with the foreign customers she was getting online. She offered me the job right there, without thinking much about it, between two sips of iced tea.

I said yes before she'd finished the sentence. I moved to Phuket with what I was standing in and next to no money, living on the bare minimum just to stay in a country that had got under my skin without anyone's permission. The job, though, wasn't what I'd pictured. The Fah running that office had little in common with the waitress who'd laughed with us in Sukhumvit. She was a demanding boss, sharp about timekeeping, and would correct me in front of customers if I got an itinerary wrong. "We're not on holiday here," she told me one afternoon after I'd lost a ferry booking. I understood pretty quickly that the girl I'd met on holiday and the woman running a business alone on an island where nobody hands you anything were two very different people.

I didn't last long in that job. One day, after another row over a badly handled transfer, I went down to Bangla Road to ask around if any bar needed a farang who spoke English behind the counter. I got turned away at two or three places without much ceremony, until I walked into one with the entrance covered in coloured balloons for one of the girls' birthday. The owner, a Malaysian guy called Rizal, bought me a beer while the others sang around a cake with far too many candles on it. We talked for a good while and he asked, half joking, whether I had any bar management experience. I lied just enough to sound convincing. He introduced me that same night to a business partner of his, also Malaysian, who had a few more bars along the same street and needed someone English-speaking to run the day-to-day. I started work that same night, no contract, no paperwork, no one asking any questions.

I spent about three months managing that bar. I learned more about how Bangla Road actually worked in those twelve weeks than in every trip before it combined. Who took commission on what, how the girls got split between bars depending on the season, which owners got on and which ones hadn't spoken in years, how you handled a drunk customer before it turned into a fight or a trip to the police station, and who you actually called when things really got out of hand. I was paid a pittance, barely enough for food and a room above a motorbike shop, but I wouldn't trade those three months for anything. It was the fastest, most honest education I've ever had in how Thailand actually works behind the pretty front the two-week tourist sees.

It all came to an end when a tax rebate from my Australia days finally landed, money I'd more or less written off by that point. As soon as it hit the account I left the bar without much of an explanation, and spent a few weeks properly enjoying Phuket without working for the first time in months before flying home to the UK, the same rucksack a lot more battered than it had been on the way out.

I haven't stopped moving since that first trip in 2009. I've ended up in places I didn't even know existed before I first packed a bag. But Thailand's still the one place I always find an excuse to get back to. A few years ago I put my dad on a plane for the first time in his life, freshly turned 60, and took him with me so he could see it for himself. He made every rookie mistake going, some of them worse than mine back in 2009, including one involving a tuk-tuk that still makes me laugh until it hurts whenever I tell it. But that's a story for another day.

And while we're on confessions: no, I never had a work permit. Not at Fah's travel shop, not at Rizal's bar. I worked both jobs exactly the same way, without paperwork and without asking myself too hard what would happen if anyone checked. Nobody ever did.