After that F45 class — the one that changed everything — I didn’t know exactly what to do next, but one thing was clear:  it was finally time to start leaving Bangkok for real.  

There was one last errand to deal with:  laundry.  Of course it was still sitting near the original hotel, the one that felt more like a punishment than a place to sleep.  So I doubled back one last time.  Clothes retrieved,  mission complete.  From there, I tried to get a taxi to the southern bus terminal.  The quote?  800 baht.  No thanks.

So,  naturally,  I did what had become almost routine:  jumped on the back of a motorbike for a nearly 30km ride across the city.  The driver was laid-back, the breeze cut through the city’s weight, and the sunset.  Wow!  I won’t forget that.  It painted the sky in fire and softness all at once.  Days like this burn themselves into memory.

By now, everything I owned fit in a single small bag.  I was running lean.  Next destination:  Hua Hin.  Far enough to break orbit, close enough to manage in one shot.  At the southern bus terminal was the usual chaos. I asked where to buy tickets.  The guy waved toward the stairs and said,  “Just go down and hop in a minivan.”  That was that.

Somehow, I landed the front-row VIP seat.  Not complaining.

We hit the road, briefly.  Then the sky cracked open.  One torrential downpour after another,  sheets of rain pounding the windshield.  The roads flooded so fast it felt like we were driving through a river.  Whatever dry season remained had officially tapped out.  Rainy season had arrived:  at least a month early and with fury and force.

Progress slowed.  But the mission was still on.  Southbound.

Eventually, the storms gave way and Hua Hin came into view  There was something instantly charming about the place.  Small town rhytm.   I found a little restaurant tucked into the corner of town, actually a famous place, and grabbed a bite. Nothing fancy, but it hit the spot.  After eating, I decided to walk the streets and find a place to stay.  No bookings,  no plans.  Just trusting the process.  That’s when I saw the sign:  Sofia Hotel.  Of all names.  Fitting and eerie at the same time.

I stepped in, bracing for the usual passport roadblock.  Instead, they smiled and said a photo was just fine.  No questions.  No resistance.  It felt like the second successful test of a new protocol was a confirmation that this way of moving could work.

I slept better there.

Along the walk, I was approached a few times  by women in revealing clothes offering the usual coded “massage” sales pitch.  But my head wasn’t in that space.  Not tonight and not here.  There was something about Hua Hin that felt… still. Uncomplicated.  Just laid-back enough to breathe.

The next day I woke up late and tried to do some fast reasoning:  Koh Phangan.  Full Moon Party.  Tonight.  It was a simple plan, just get to Chumphon first,  catch the ferry,  and I’d be there by sundown.  It’s only 260 kilometers.  That’s like three hours by car.  Piece of cake, right?

Wrong.

What followed was one of the most fragmented,  ridiculous travel days I’ve ever had.  A patchwork journey south, stitched together by minivans, slow trains, random transfers, and unspoken rules. It took eleven hours to reach Chumphon and this was nearly 11pm at night.

By the time I got there, the idea of a full moon party felt like a hallucination.

Somewhere along the way, I saw a pack of cycle tourists pedaling down the road in perfect formation.   My chest ached a little.  With my own bike, I could have  covered 3/4 of the same distance in a single push.  No waiting.  No guesswork. Just the road and forward motion.

Instead, I was stuck improvising every leg of the journey because I didn’t have a valid passport. Every checkpoint, every question, every ticket, it was all just delay after delay.  The speed of bureaucracy dressed up as progress.  If freedom had a measurement, today proved it wasn’t distance.

The first leg of the trip was manageable:  a minivan took me 100km south to the coastal town of Prachuap Khiri Khan.  At the station where we got dropped off,  I asked the clerk, “Do you have a minivan to Chumphon?”

She looked up, laughed, and shook her head like I’d asked for a spaceship.  Okay then.  No timetable,  no answers,  no ride.

I walked across the street to a coffee shop, found an open Wi-Fi signal, and sat down to regroup.  My phone credit was long gone,  so this café was my only line back to the outside world.

And that’s when I saw it.

The markets hadn’t just bounced — they were on steroids.  Over the weekend, news had dropped that US - China trade talks in Geneva had led to a 90-day tariff pause and a tentative roadmap for reduced barriers. The negotiations were carried out by lower-level economic officials but the market didn’t care. It read the signal loud and clear: risk back on.  

And the real kicker?  China conceded!

Xi Jinping of course was absent from the talks.  He was grinning with Vladimir Putin in Moscow.  Those optics alone told me everything I needed to know:  the two autocrats were posturing while their grip was slipping.  Meanwhile, Trump — indirectly but effectively — had pulled off another stunning leverage move.  Say what you will about him, but his instinct for negotiation remains unmatched.

In that café, I pivoted hard.I went ballistic.  I pulled out the laptop, opened positions.  Watched the green flood in.  Over the next few hours, I booked thousands in realized gains.

While stranded, I caught a global macro wave and rode it to profit.  Who even cares about the minivans now?

Rreality came knocking again.  My phone was still dead and useless, and the 7/11 had conveniently stopped offering top-up services.  I needed to find an actual AIS shop to sort this shit out.

I ordered a motorbike and headed off.

At the AIS shop they asked,  “Can we see your passport?”Of course.  I handed over the digital photo on my phone.  They accepted it.  Problem solved.

While I was there, I picked up a new backpack and ordered a Thai omelette from the food stall outside.  Then,  just like clockwork,  the skies opened again.  Another torrential downpour:  loud, relentless, and impossible to ignore.  There was no way I was going anywhere for a while.

Random minivans kept pulling in and out of the lot nearby, but I had no idea where any of them were headed.  The phone app showed no available drivers. I couldn’t get back to the station.

So, I walked.

About 20 minutes into the humid shuffle, a minivan saw me and honked then pulled over. The door slid open.

It’s not every day a soaked farang with a bag is walking along a rain-slicked highway by himself.  It was safe to assume I was looking for somewhere to go.

I climbed in. 

“Chumphon?” I asked.“No.” 

“Bang Saphan?”  

“Yes… but why do you want to go there?”

I looked at him and shrugged:“Because you’re not going to Chumphon.”

Fair enough, he laughed.  The journey rolled on

As the van rolled south through stretches of wet, half-forgotten coastline, my thoughts kept circling back to what had happened that Sunday in Bangkok. That idea.  That blueprint.  That... thing that had dropped into my consciousness mid-F45, like a flash drive inserted into my brain.  I tried to push it aside, to tell myself I was overthinking it.  But it wouldn’t let go.

I started running through scenario after scenario in my mind.  This “movement,” or whatever it ends up becoming,  felt like it might actually work.  I can’t say more for the sake of opsec but what I can say is this:  I’ve checked and double-checked.  No one else is doing this.  No one is even close.

It’s truly original.

Whether it takes shape tomorrow or five years from now,  I don’t know.  But I do know this:  it’s living rent-free in my head now, and I don’t think it’s leaving.

Eventually, we pulled into Bang Saphan, a town so quiet it felt abandoned.  I reached out to a friend — the one who runs the Sananwan Palace — to ask if her old beach house was still available nearby.  It wasn’t.  Closed a year ago. Another casualty of COVID.  She had once pitched it to me as an investment. I’m glad I passed, but hearing it had folded still left a knot in my stomach.

Because if that beach house of hers didn’t make it… how much longer does the Sananwan Palace have left?

Everything feels fragile now. Even the places that used to anchor me.

I wasn’t sure what to do next.  The minivans had all stopped for the day, but there was still a train station.  It was silent, flickering, almost apologetic in its emptiness.  One train was scheduled for 9:00 PM.  But this is Thailand.  Trains here don’t run on schedules,  they run on guesses.

The station attendant looked at me like I was pitiful — a lone foreigner drifting through a nowhere town after dark. Maybe I was.

With three hours to kill, I wandered off to find food.  I asked for fried rice. They handed me a bag of white rice — literally, a plastic bag knotted at the top.  A girl nearby noticed the confusion and helped translate.  She was flirty but I didn’t care.  I wasn’t in the mood for small talk or human connection. Not tonight.  My mind was elsewhere.  I turned down her advances.

That idea that had invaded my brain back in Bangkok was still with me, louder than ever. It wasn’t just a flash of insight anymore. It wanted form.  Structure. Flesh on bone.  So I found an Amazon Café nearby, got a coffee, and opened the laptop.  Then I did what I always do when I need to sort chaos from clarity:  I asked AI for help.

Over the next few hours, something began to take shape:  a framework.  The beginnings and foundations of what would later become an actual training manual.  It was still crude, rough, unfinished. But it existed. That was the turning point.

Something real had begun.

The train ended up being only 20 minutes late which is a miracle by Thai standards.  At the counter, they asked for my passport.  You already know how that story goes.  

Once onboard, I quickly realized this wasn’t your typical Thai train ride.  The staff were polite but militaristic in their order.  Seats were assigned with surgical precision.  Tickets were checked more than once.  The lead attendant looked me over and said with a smile,“I take care you.”  It sounded kind.It also meant:  We’re watching you.

The train rumbled through the dark.  Its final destination was Sungai Kolok which is deep in the restive border provinces.  I had biked through that territory not long ago and it stayed with me.   Many passengers on this train were Muslim, some with children in tow.  Kids were running up and down the car, fidgeting, restless.  You could see it in their eyes.  They knew this journey was far from over.  For them,  it was still 12+ hours to go.

But I got it.  Strictness made sense out here.  Because if not for this train, there was no other way south tonight.  No minivans.  No buses.  No backup plan.Unless you had a private car or a bike, this was it.

So I did what I could with the time and silence:  I pulled out my phone and logged into the market.  The U.S. session had just begun.  It was time to switch gears — from drifting traveler to active trader.  Even on a moving train in the deep night, the game doesn’t stop.

I began closing out stock positions:  some at profit, some at loss,  but mostly those that had ridden the recent rally.  I sold a series of short put options for income, which was cycling premiums into my account like gears locking into place.

Within this train ride, the goal was achieved:  I had freed up thousands of dollars in cash.  Not margin.  Not paper profits.    Cash.    C - A - S - H.   There was enough to sustain the midnight run for a year or more, if needed.That changed everything.

More importantly, it wasn’t just about hoarding liquidity. I reinvested parts of that cash with buying more targeted stocks, selling new puts, and executing defensive moves that would act as built-in stabilizers.  In fact, I purposely opened new short stock positions at a loss in this insane bull run.  This sounds ridiculous, but it was done as a hedge, or a safeguard against the next market reversal.

That’s how confident I had become in the architecture of the system.  This wasn’t gambling.This was engineering.

Whether the market continues to surge next or collapse again, I was ready.With cash in hand, layered strategies in place, and the emotional bandwidth to not panic, I was finally where I had been trying to get to for months:

Free.