Ong was online at 1am (Thai time) which I found quite unusual as most of them are asleep much earlier, so I made contact with her and it turned out she was doing a night shift at an Udon Thani hotel (Ruysuk). She came over being very pleasant and incredibly laid back, and far from being eager let's say. In a way that was perhaps a better sign than being begged to fly out in the next week to visit them!
We used Badoo and MSN Messenger for a few weeks to chat away the hours, but I was already itching to get back out to the land of smiles, so I asked her if I could come and see her in December that year. She accepted and arranged to take a month off work to spend time with me.
So along came 14th December, and I was like a child in a toy shop, far too excited about flying back to this amazing country. I arrived at Udon Thani airport the next day and sure enough, Ong was waiting for me (with a friend that I had seen on Badoo while talking to Ong).
Ong has a young daughter but also had the sense to leave her with relatives so that we could have some proper time together, so we booked in to a hotel (not where she worked) and "discovered" each other over the next 28 days. We went to Rayong for a week to visit one of her brothers (a musician), it is not a tourist trap so most of our time was spent eating in restaurants and listening to her brother entertain the customers.
By the time the month was up, I had seen and heard enough to believe she may well have been "the one", certainly a very good one that was not going to be gold-digging. So I proposed, a proposal that was accepted. Great! All I had to do now was to push the divorce through as quickly as possible and tell my employers I was about to vanish from the UK.