Important things you need to know

I gave in and bought 'the frog'. The best, and most annoying present in the world. Visitors to Thailand must know the brilliance of these

We only went to NANDO'S!

Singapore

Singapore river

Up the river

Nic got hot so took advantage of a water feature

Singapore Sling baby!

We're only here for a day before we fly off to Sydney, and so we thought we'd have a walk around. After a while we got too hot and couldn't find anything....so we went shopping!

Kuala Lumpur to Singapore

This was the view for 8hours

We had some tunes on!

This requires its own section as choosing an 8hour train journey over a flight clearly has it's perks! We set off at 8.30am in first class (and the ticket only cost 10 quid...yay!) and it was pretty cool, we had lots of leg room and it was very comfy. It wasn't long until we saw the benefits of going by train! For some reason, Malaysian's seem to be the world champions of hocking up spit, as heard every morning in our ghetto hotel, and they take any opportunity to do this, at breakfast, in the street, any place is good for a Malay! This clearly extends into snoring technique, and luckily we were placed in front of the loudest snorer on the whole train. It was horrific. How any person can make such a loud noise and not wake themselves up just amazes me. Then obviously such a long trip with need a trip to the toilet. However, DO NOT go to the loo at a stop, it may look like a toilet, but yes, its just a whole in the bottom of the train leading directly to the tracks. Ladies get away with it easy however, the lads have an ever so hygenic squat toilet, and in the desperate situation of a number 2.....you hold on to a rail on the wall, feet placed just below as well, pushed against the wall, and just squat away. We were kept amused by a Singaporean (yes that is the correct term) man who filmed pretty much the whole journey out the window. We think he may have been a train spotter as he also felt the need to film the train conductors, mid conversation. And the piece de resistance! Nicola went to check out the food buffet, a little confused by it all she hung around to see what all the others were doing... and before long she was cornered by the 'bottle of water hander outer' and his mate in some corridor, and they wanted her to pose for many different photos, including one's with them in it! We're thinking our pasty white skin is getting some attention! By 5.30 after going through much immigration bother we made it to Singapore!

Kuala Lumpur

The Petronas Twin Towers

The Menara Tower

At night in KL!

We got a plane from Phuket over to Kuala Lumpur and it wasn't long before we were writing the first chapter of 'how to be mugged off in Malaysia, for Dummies'. As we got in to the airport we got on a big coach with a million other people with the promise that we'd be dropped off at our hotel. Not that I want to brand a whole country, but Malaysia is not that far from Thailand and had probably been tipped off that those '2 white girls' were an easy target. After about 2 hours on the bus we noticed that a lot of the hotels looked familiar and it was clear they had no idea where 'Hotel Grand Central' was. Before long we got kicked out right by 'our' hotel, so given that we were only paying about 10quid a night, we were suprised to see that according to the friendly driver we were staying at what looked like the plushed hotel ever. We checked the address with him and he swore blind that that was the right address. So they drive off and we find that we're about 10 minutes away by taxi from our slightly less fancy hotel and we're not amused.


Kuala Lumpur has the highest twin towers in the world, so we checked them out, although couldn't actually go up them because of some ticket fiasco of course. Nevermind, the city also has a tower called the Menara Tower which gives you a guided audio tour up on the top looking over the city. Oh and up there we saw some weird Malaysian pop star, probs an Asian Idol contestant, who was followed by about 50 kids all dressed in white. Clearly his photo shoots have a dress code! Other than that Kuala Lumpur was pretty much just shopping, impressive shopping though, but given our budget we couldn't exactly saunter around louis vuitton flashing the cash!

Phuket

We have moved to Phuket by yet another death defying ferry ride from Phi Phi and have been here for nearly a week. I'd love to tell you what Phuket is like but all I can say is that the toilet in our room is quite nice and the film channel on our tv is awesome. Yep, that's it, we're nearly leaving Thailand and those sly Thais decided to give us something to remember them by....a bit of Bangkok belly. We have ventured as far as the beach now though and we can tell you that pretty much every other female is either a prostitute or a lady boy, and 9 times out of 10 they will be attached to a fat German man looking like it's his birthday. Oh and for the record we have seen our first Western male and Thai ladyboy pairing. Lovely stuff. Malaysia here we come!

Phi Phi Island

At Carlito's Bar

The wet suits were Korean size, ok?!

Maya bay, aka The Beach

The beach we became bronzed goddesses on

Near the port in Phi Phi

Just off of Krabi there are a few islands, one of them called Phi Phi Don, and all of them were damaged by the tsunami in 2004, but back on their way to recovery now! We decided to pay Phi Phi a visit as is it much hyped about and we weren't disappointed! We did a test run as the boat only runs once a day and we needed to find some accomodation for when we decided to actually stay there, and this was a trip in itself! We were expecting the usual ferry but oh no... we get to the port and there's no ferry in sight, well except for the one we can barely see on the horizon..and we're rushed on to a 'longtail boat', which is thai speak for wooden box with a motor. Add about 10 more people into this tiny space and all their baggage and we were good to go. 5 harrowing minutes later and after being splashed around a bit we get to the ferry in mid water, and have to tenatively jump from one boat to the other, forget the safety of a rope keeping the boats together, we're in Thailand! 24hours later and we did the journey again, not so bad this time, and we were ready to move there! Phi Phi island is pretty beautiful and very small so there are no cars and is a nice place to spend a day or 3 on the beach like we did! We even did some more diving which was great! We were taken to Phi Phi Ley, a smaller island where they filmed 'The Beach' and we did 2 dives off there and it was brilliant! We hadn't done any diving since Corsica last Summer so we were a bit nervous and did a few skills before we swam about, but it was good because it was only us two and our English guide, Andy. We saw all kinds of fish like Nemo, a barracuda, a giant clam, eels, weird spiky fish and pufferfish! Plus it was cool seeing where they filmed the film, except we doubt that Leo diCaprio stayed in our hotel with salt water for a shower! Hmph!

My Birthday, the best and most important day of the year!

Cosmo o'clock!

Birthday meal Thai style

Check the technique! Out of sync baby!

Nic made friends with the locals

That is an evil that even I couldn't manage

I didn't spit on myself!

Crab city, Thailand

Of all the people to be excited about my birthday it should have been Nicola, to whom I had been treating to a birthday countdown everyday, but suprise suprise it was moi who was up at the crack of dawn getting ready for the big day! Shockingly, Nicola did NOT I repeat NOT get me a birthday present, but she did treat me to a Burger King breakfast in bed including tea, bliss! We had to be up early anyway because we had booked a trip to go kayaking in some nearby mangroves. We got a lift in yet another backless van/truck and were greeted by many other wannabe kayak...ers! We were in a small group of our guides, some middle ageing Brummie couple, a fearsome duo of two Thai ladies and us (with me at the front of course). The first stretch of water was troublesome particularly as Nicola seemed to refuse to cooperate with her paddling skills, and pretty much every other minute we were veering off to the right. Of course this was all her fault. It wasn't long though before we saw some of the 'wildlife' in the form of millions of tiny crabs on this one bit of beach, there were so many you couldnt tell what they were and just coated the whole beach! Then we really hit the jackpot and we saw monkeys! They were so cool and our bad boy tour guide fed them pineapple so they were like putty in our hands (and our boat, ah!). We went around all morning and then headed back only to get our game faces on against all the other couples and it was a show down against Mr and Mrs Brummie. Nicola finally saw sense and decided to syncronise her rowing with me, and we won and made it back to camp first, woop! After that we had a cold beer back at the hotel where the sly thais duped Nicola out of a cake for my birthday, nevermind, it was the thought that counts! We will learn one day that we will never defeat those wily thais. I then treated myself to a Thai massage, that involved yet more bending and breaking and clicking and yelping, and finished with a ginger tea, phew! We then went to a cocktail 'bar' (a term used loosely to describe the roof of someone's garage boasting a cocktail menu) which was the only place in Thailand so far to make Cosmopolitans! So we had our fill of those, then went out for a meal, yum yum! A good day in all.... for a 24year old!

Krabi

Not so crappy in Krabi

Nicola found sunset mode on her camera!

An evening stroll!

After Lisa left, Nicola and I stayed one more night and had a walk further up the beach in Koh Samui to find lots of very posh bars hidden away, clearly we missed that one! We got a flight to Krabi which is on the mainland, on the 'Andaman' coast. Given that our organisation so far has been whatever my Mum was kind enough to book for us, it wasn't a suprise that leaving us to our own devices was going to go wrong. We managed to book accomodation by finding some wireless internet under a coconut tree on the beach at night time and we thought we had done pretty well! We arrive at the actual hotel and of course it all went wrong and they were over booked! HOWEVER! In a strange and unfamiliar act of Thai kindness, they put us up for a night in a very fancy hotel instead and then went back to the original hotel after the first night.

Koh Samui airport, the greatest in the world!

This is our gate

The only toilet in the whole of Thailand to impress me

Just look at the sinks! 2 weeks worth of minging toilets have made us appreciative!

Walking to our gate past customs!

Our plane, check it Pete!

Even though Koh Samui is a relatively small island and not all that developed in places, the airport is clearly built to impress, I'll let the snaps do the talking!

Koh Samui!

Check it out!

Our beach at Koh Samui

Just before Lisa left for home!

After the parties in Koh Phangan we decided to chill out a bit and got a ferry over to Koh Samui! It was beautiful so we decided just to chill out a bit and get a tan, especially as it was Lisa's last few days. On Wednesday Lisa left us to fly back home and then there were two!

Full Moon Party

The Thais have quite a grasp of the English language

Drunk people saw this as a skipping rope, we saw it as death

Look at Lisa with her bucket

This was our afterparty

The beach in Koh Phangan

Lisa got a butterfly!

Nic got a sun

I got a butterfly too, but clearly mine was better

No wonder we saw so many burns victims the day after

After Chiang Mai we moved to the island of Koh Phangan, famous for its Full Moon Parties! The journey involved 2 planes, one sweaty coach for an hour and an old ferry that surely should have been condemned 10 years ago, which took about 3 hours. We finally got there and we were chucked in amongst the many other travellers heading to the party the next day and shoved in yet another state of the art backless van/cab. After yet another mugging off where the taxi driver tried to drop us far away from the hotel, we arrived ok and spend the next day settling in. The next evening we headed to Haad Rin, where the party takes place. Having seen so many travellers heading to the island that day we were expecting the beach to be rammed and have our heads shoved in sweaty armpits all night long (a bit like a night in Maidstone really), but it was quite the opposite. We could walk up and down the beach alongside all the bars that that situated there playing there own kind of music and offering drinks, and everyone else seemed to be involved in some fire games, where pretty much everything was lit on fire and random drunk people ran through it. Lisa decided to do us proud and buy a 'bucket'. It consists of a 200ml bottle of spirit (vodka was the tipple of her choice) and then filled with a load of orange juice, put inside a sandcastle bucket with a straw! All for about 2quid! And that wasn't even a 'F***ing Big Bucket'. We had a bit of a dance and laughed at all the drunk people and then realised that Lisa was actually quite drunk, and so we went home and Lisa got fruity with the hotel's cat! And the party went on until after the sun came up.....

THAT night in Bangkok

One man and his 'rent' (and Lisa for a secret squirrel operation type photo)

Lisa and I tried to figure out the angles of the 'X club' routine

These are the snaps from the night in Bangkok, where our eyes were scarred for life in the boy show, the snaps have taken a while to pass the Blogspot censorship policies hence the lateness. Seeing a man taking a Thai girl home is pretty bad, but being forced to see a bloke with his Thai boy in a restaurant was a little hard to stomach. The following day, we all struggled to come to terms with the night and instead decided to reinact what we had not removed from our minds already. At least we laughed for the first time since the scarring occurred.

Chiang Mai

Nic goes solo, err but with her fancy Thai boy guide

Lisa enjoying the ride, me fearing for my life

Baby longneck

Mummy longneck

Bamboo rafting

Elephant 'painting' a picture (see little Thai man actually guiding the trunk behind!)

The masterpiece, 600 baht madam!

Pele eat your heart out

Chiang Mai is in the far North of Thailand and seems a bit more interesting. We booked a tour and were taken to an elephant farm...and there were tonnes of elephants doing some random acrobatics and being rode bareback! First of all we were taken down the river on some bamboo raft type construction, and then we saw the true 'talent' of the elephants! They played football, basketball, danced and even painted! Although, suprise it was all a thai sham, as they had some Thai kid secretly holding the trunk and painting away making Nelly look like some kind of a picasso! We did get to ride the elephants which was hilarious as I swear we had the one dysfunctional elephant that was determined to chuck us out of our extremely safe box that we were sitting in. After that we went to some Tribal village for the 'Karen Longneck' People who originally come from Burma. All the girls have heavy metal rings put around their neck and it gradually creates the look that they have a GIANT neck! It was a bit weird because it was a bit staged, but it was interesting anyway!