Thailand

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I had another pretty long journey down to Koh Tao - 27 hours door to door from Siem Reap which involved a pretty scary share taxi journey from Siem Reap to the border - the whole way I was planning how I would get to a hospital in bangkok when we crashed and how i would contact home and the people i knew in the area who would be able to come and help me - but as it amzingly happenned i didnt need it and i got to the border safely, crossed and instantly saw how different thailand is from where i had been for the past 6 weeks - it seemed positively developed! Motorbike took me to the bus station and i got there with 5 minutes to spare so grabbed a bag of crisps for my lunch and headed off in the direction of bangkok. We arrived at bus station out of town so i had to get a taxi into the centre - and remember guys always get a meted taxi because one guy tried to get me in his and it would have cost 4 times that of the metered one! i made it to the khao san road at 5 tp 6pm and went to a travel agent hoping to get on the 7.30pm train that evening but no luck because the trains were full, there was a space on a bus but it was leaving at 6pm! I had 5 minutes to try and find myself some dinner before an overnight bus journey down to chumphon where i ended up spending 3 hours in the early hours waiting for a ferry to take me to koh tao - but i made it and it actually wasnt that bad, but then not a lot could be anywhere near as bad as that journey from laos to vietnam!

koh tao wasnt quite what i was expecting and i thought the beach was a bit disappointing because it was quite narrow but i stayed at a place called big blue where they were all really friendly and they had a really nice big deck where you could watch the sunset every night with a beer in hand! The diving off koh tao was ok but i agreed with some greek/austrian people whi i was diving with that it was a little disappointing as te visibility wasnt great (apparently made worse by the recent full moon) and there wasnt a huge array of fish and no sharks or turtles but it was good to get back into it and i met a really good group of people. I now know how to say cheers in german, greek, sweedish/danish and i keep forgetting the gaelic.

After 5 days on the island of really not doing much, i never even managed to do a boat trip round the island i headed to koh samui for the night to meet up with uni friends Lizzie, Dani Laura and Nikki. it was really great to see them but a little strange after nearly two months of being with strangers everyday to see some ery frienfly faces from home. we went out for a lovely meal and hit the night spots of chaweng - although it could have been any european destination - not really my thing but great none the less because i was with gerat company. I couldnt stay long and had to head back to bangkok the next afternoon to get my flight to OZ!

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