The first day of Chines New Year started well, We said goodbye to Mr Stephen from the KL Chinatown2 hotel and loaded our hungover heads into the minivans that would take us to Port Dickson which should only be 2 hours away, but because Port Dickson is the nearest beach resort to KL the Chinese new year tourist traffic put us back by another few hours. The hotel we stayed in was quite full of people celebrating the New Year, although it was all very strange to see the pool and beach full of fully clothed people. I'm not sure if [View Full Entry]

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After 3 days on the beach in Krabi it was time to get back to city life with two nights on the Island of Penang and another two in Kuala Lumpar (or KL as the locals like to call it). Penang is a fairly small island of the Northwest coast of Malaysia. The population of Malaysia is mainly Muslim and because of that the cost of Alcohol is roughly 3 times that of Thailand (actually about the same price as in the UK but I’ve been getting used to cheep booze over the past few months. Next door to our hotel [View Full Entry]

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Due to the tour I booked down to Singapore being cancelled, I booked another one with Intrepid that was very similar although it did mean that I would go Back to Kao Sok National Park for a couple of nights (see previous blog). So my last tour started with another overnight train down to Surat Thani then a minibus over to the park. Since I had so much fun last time, I convinced everyone we should go tubing down the river again. Didn't see many snakes this time but we did stop off at the monkey temple again. We found a [View Full Entry]

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We arrived back in Bangkok bus station without any real plans on what we were going to do for the last few nights before Pam flew back. We decided on the Patpong area because someone had recommended it and it was close to the skytrain route. Patpong is quite a touristy area famous for it's night market, pole dancing bars and ping pong shows. Since we only had a couple of days before Pam flew home we opted for a more upmarket hotel (one with hot water, AC and a slightly smaller mosquito count), which compared to the accommodation we'd had [View Full Entry]

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We arrived on a very wet Koh Samui around lunchtime on New Year's Eve and as we looked out the windows of the bus we could see rivers of rain pouring down the road. The prospect of spending New Years Eve on a wet beach wasn't really getting us in the spirit. Our rooms on Koh Samui where basically a terraced version of the bungalows we had in the jungle although the mosquito count was a lot higher, we had (some) hot water and the walls were paper thin (more on that in a bit). The weather managed to settle down [View Full Entry]

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After our Chang Mai trekking experience we headed back to Bangkok before we stated the second part of the tour to Southern Thailand. We had the majority of 2 days free so first off we went for a well deserved massage then a spot of lunch before we said goodbye to Clare and Taryn who were heading down to Phuket for a few days of sun. That evening we met up with the new group and guide who from the start seemed a little incompetent. He started the meeting before everyone was there, he forgot to introduce himself or any of [View Full Entry]

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After a somewhat difficult night’s sleep aboard the overnight train to Chang Mai we arrived at the hotel around 7:30am. We had decided to do a Thai cookery class which involved a trip to the local market to buy all the ingredients then to the cookery school and we were shown how to cook phad thai, green curry, tam yum soup and sesame prawn toast. The class was a lot more fun than I was expecting, I might even give a few of the recipies a try when we get back home. That evening we visited the Chang Mai Night Bizarre [View Full Entry]

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Sorry it’s been a while since my last blog, it’s all been a bit hectic since Pam arrived and we started the Thailand Unplugged tour. Like I said in my last post, I had a week to fill before Pam arrived so I headed down to Ko Sumui for a little bit time on the beach. Ko Phangan is an amazing almost Paradise like island that is host to the infamous full moon party, because of this 5 days either side of the party all the prices double of everything. It’s understandable up to a point as I was there on [View Full Entry]

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It took most of the day to get from Battambang to Bangkok via a fairly painless border crossing , I’d heard it could take a couple of hours go get across, but we seemed to get through in around half an hour. We dumped our bags in the hotel and headed down to the infamous Ko San road for our last night together as a group. The Ko San road is exactly what I expected it to be, hawkers selling everything from Suits to fake ID’s along with food stalls with slightly questionable hygiene standards. There was also a guy selling [View Full Entry]

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Not long after arriving in Siem Reap we were loaded on the bust and taken to our first temple to watch the sunset. After a 20 minute walk to the top of a hill it became apparent that sunsets are a popular pastime in Siem Reap. There was easily 1000 people standing on anything they could to get a better view of what admittedly was an amazing sunset. I wish I could say the same about the sunrise over the main Angkor Wat temple which we had to be up at 4am to watch along with a hell of a lot [View Full Entry]

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