Sometime in October we had an e-mail from our friend Dave in the UK who had managed to co-ordinate his holiday time with one of our trips to Hong Kong in mid-November. Unfortunately, we would only have one day and one night before Dave and his friend, Rob were due to fly to Cambodia so we jumped at the chance to meet up. As regular visitors to Hong Kong we were racking our brains for a new thing we could do while we were on this visit. We have already been up Victoria Peak more times than we’d like to admit and we knew that Dave and Rob wouldn’t want to shop all day . So we decided on an action plan - visit the Big Buddha on Lantau island, afternoon cocktails and then a nice ... read more

We were thankful that our tummies had calmed down from the roller coasters by the time we were checking in for our flight to Bangkok. We are slightly surprised that Hong Kong airport doesn’t have the self-check in machines other airports have, but Air Asia have actually invested in staff numbers here, so there is several check in desks available for all flight destinations open! The flight went very smoothly, arrival into Don Mueang still reminds us of the first time we went to Thailand, except without the scrum of taxi mafia waiting at the arrival doors! It’s a little disappointing that Don Mueang has been the Air Asia hub for 9 months now and there doesn’t seem to have been any real improvement to what is offered at the airport. For example, despite asking in ... read more

One thing we had been looking forward to was a day trip to Ang Thong National park. We had planned to do it last year when we were on Koh Samui but after Paul's motorbike accident it wasn't to be. After researching a bit, we decided to book a speedboat tour to the national park (1600 baht each inc lunch and snorkelling equipment), after the boat ride to Koh Phangan we didn’t fancy the slower boat! Ang Thong literally translates as "golden bowl" and is a protected national park with over 40 islands. All of the islands are uninhabited and undeveloped except for two of them (one has sea gypsies living on it and the other is the national park headquarters).Everything went very smoothly, our pick up was even early! We sat on the back of ... read more

This is quite a long blog, so it might be an idea to settle in with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit! We started this trip with a 12 hour wait in between our flight arriving into Suvarnabhumi airport and our next departing from Don Muang airport…plenty of time to head into the city and get a Thai meal before hopping in a taxi to Don Muang to wait for our onward flight to the far south of Thailand. The journey to the island Arriving into Hat Yai airport, it wasn’t immediately clear what our transport options onwards were…there were some guys there selling onward minibus and boat tickets for 1000 baht and it seemed a little overpriced, we opted for the minibus to the bus station at 100 baht ... read more

This time we aren’t starting our blog with a flight nightmare but an airport nightmare…seriously, what is wrong with our luck at the moment? We took advantage of some cheap flights but unfortunately those cheap flights were from Clark airport, 3 hours north of Manila. We will warn you now that this is a rather long blog and is a little bit ranty. Getting to Boracay... Clark airport is so bad, we really don’t know where to start! We were very thankful we weren’t flying internationally as the queue for Immigration was huge (there were only 2 officers on duty for 3 departing flights, it took some people an hour and a half to clear Immigration!) and then we had the complete farce of the security check. You know how you give some people a uniform ... read more