backpacking09, first stop thailand

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Been planning our trip for at least a year and made sure Thailand was the first stop, it was my 5th time in Thailand, love the place so much. We started our journey in Bangkok which is pretty hectic, i always try to stay near khao san road which is called by backpackers the gateway to south east asia. Probably one of the most buzzing places to visit in Bangkok. We had a long night flight from London so when we arrived in Bangkok we were real tired, But we went straight to Khao san, we went for our first chang beer in one of the many beer bars in khao san and was very strange because the first backpackers we met were from our same county of Shropshire, small world hey... They had bought a bag of cooked insects and insisted we try some, we ate ants and crickets, nice.. We drank a few more beers then we all left in tuk tuks to go to a ping pong show which was really dodgy.... After a few days in Bangkok we decided to see a bit of Thailands history so we booked a trip to the ancient capital of Ayutthaya..

The original plan was to go Chang mai but we were both cravin the islands so we decided to get the night train to koh samui, was a good way of travellin down thailand, we had a private sleeper train for around 1500baht for 2 of us, but not the best nights sleep ive ever had...We arrived in Samui after a coach and boat trip and decided to stay on lamai beach and get a beach hut for a few nights, our beach hut was very chilled out and gave us some good time to relax, Jody wasn't keen on the basic bathroom tho. ha ha...
We were queit far out from all the fun of samui tho so we rented a moped and went round on that, my first time riding a moped tho and was very fun. We went on an elephant trek and tried to find a waterfall but couldnt find it, bit of a money spinner and we did both feel really sorry for the elephants. But thats Thailand and they make money in any way they can, gotta love the place. The people are all so nice and it is nick named the land of smiles and elephant country.
We then decided to move to Chaweng in Koh samui for a few days, we stayed in the green rooms which is a cheap guest house with hot shower, tv,dvd player and aircon, only 600baht,bargain.. after a week in Samui we decided we would go Koh tao and do some snorkelling, we rented mopeds again and travelled the island and snorkelled at various places, we snorkelled at shark island but was gutted didn't see any sharks. We then went to Nangyuna island on a boat trip to snorkel, we met 2 New yorker girls on the trip. This was our first proper snokelling since ariving in Thailand and my snorkel i bought kept filling up with water so didn't do as much as id hoped to and didn't see any big fish just the little ones.. But was a good day out and Jody enjoyed the sun bathing....
After a week we got a boat to Chumphon and stayed at Mr Tans guest house which was a new place and Mr Tan was very interesting, he had his own coffee making machine and made and sold coffee, he insisted i take a picture of him with his machine. I would recomend his guest house, double room with aircon 230 baht, bargain and ya gotta check out his machine he's so proud of.
After Chumphon we caught a bus from the main bus terminal to Phuket for around 300baht, dirt cheap, it took around 10 hours, we decided to stay at Kata beach but there wasn't to much to do there so we moved on to Patong which was really fun, we had several nights out and met some real interesting characters and lots of ladyboys too. We did the james bond island tour and kayaking it was a really good trip and cost around 1200baht.

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