Nin and Alfie took a taxi to Phuket airport. Her flight to Bangkok left three hours before his, to Cape Town via Kuala Lumpur. When they flagged that her flight was boarding, they hugged and said goodbye. If all went to plan, he would be back in a few months.

The hundred days were over. He achieved much of what he set out to do and had a list of new objectives. The world is not black and white, and neither was Alfie’s adventure. It had been many colours. Colours that imbued him with new life, new experiences, some exciting, some revealing, some difficult to understand, and some funny. Above all, he learned, and the prospect of learning more on his return was motivation enough to get him back to Thailand as soon as he could. Business would determine how soon.

Some of the Bhudda way had rubbed off and his thinking had changed, as he hoped it would. Alfie knew what he wanted and was committed to a challenging project. Building a house and living in the poorest region of Thailand was unlikely to be a simple accomplishment or as idyllic as the dream.

For a hundred days he hadn’t given a thought to the Post it Notes stuck on the fridge door or the empty wine bottles scattered around the kitchen. He should have binned the lot before he left. The last thing he wanted were reminders of an unsavoury period in his life, and they would go the moment he walked in the door. The memory of his ex-wife was filed in archives, and he was no longer miserable and disillusioned, as he had been when he started the hundred days in South-East Asia.

But Thailand had such an impact, and Alfie’s world was turned on its head once more.

When it stopped spinning, would he know who he was?

The day before he left Phuket, the United States Congress rejected the Government’s bank bail-out bill, Wall Street was in cardiac arrest, and financial markets across the globe were in meltdown. All hell erupted, queues formed outside banks like giant anacondas, and riots broke out in China and across Europe.

Time and Alfie’s resolve would determine if he had taken on more than he could handle. But he was confident, a man of his word, and there was no going back. Did he have the strength it would take to tackle the repercussions from the bankers’ greed, and the failure of government regulators to prevent it from happening?

Only time would tell.