9 February 2007: Are you on the right bus?

A Thai mother has been reunited with her family after being missing for 25 years due to catching the wrong bus.

In 1982 she left south Thailand on a shopping trip across the border to nearby Malaysia. She never returned, and police later told her family that she had been killed in a traffic accident. In fact, she had simply taken the wrong bus home, an error that would have been easy to fix except that she only speaks the local dialect of Malay known as Yawi so nobody could understand her requests for help.

She mistakenly hopped on a bus to Bangkok, some 700 miles north of her home. In Bangkok, unable to read Thai and speaking a language few Thais can understand, she again took a wrong bus, this time to Chiang Mai, another 430 miles further north. There she ended up as a beggar for five years, until she was sent to a homeless shelter in 1987.

For 20 years no one could understand her, until last week, when three students from her home province arrived to research the problem of homelessness at the shelter and recognised her language.

She was taken her back to her family home where her children and grandchildren were reportedly still hugging and kissing her two days after her return.