Kate At the moment we are spending the weekend in Bangkok after a couple of very tiring weeks. We are now coming to the end of our TEFL course and next Thursday will go and meet the school who have the great honour of having us work for them for the next 4 months!. At the Temple school Last week we had a full week of lessons at the Temple school, learning how to become teachers and about the ins and outs of English grammar and phonetics. The Temple school was actually a cool place to learn, apart from the fact that there were no air con classrooms and thus were baking hot. It was really interesting and we got to learn alot about Thai culture. The school is run by Buddhist monks and they provide ... read more

Kate On Tuesday we said a fond farewell to our friends in Pattaya and took a taxi to Ban Phe, about 1 1/2 hours further along the coast, where TEFL International is based. We have signed up for the Special Thain Project, which means we take a TEFL certificate and then teach in Thailand for 4 months. There is a great demand for native English speaking teachers in Thailand to help Thai kids to speak English using the right pronouciation. They therefore set up the ThaiSpecial Project to bring in a large number of native English speaking teachers ready for the new school term, which begins half way through May. During the course we are being put up in a Condo hotel a few km out of Ban Phe. Its right on the seafront and has ... read more

Kate: Congratulations to my cousin Claire and her husband Dan on the birth of their second son, Ben Oliver. Welcome to the family Ben!. And Happy Birthday to my Mum for 24th March Kris: So you know how it is...you're away bumming around a beautiful foreign country looking after elephants...when it all gets a bit tiring - so it was time for a holiday! We had a quiet period at the camp with only one volunteer and too many members of staff, so we decided to go away for a few days. We didn't wanna go too far but didn't fancy the hustle and bustle of Bangkok. So we decided on Trat. We stayed in Trat for one night on the way back from our brief visit to Cambodia and as it was nice and ... read more

Kate So for the last three weeks we have been staying with some of the Ecoexplorer staff at the Green Jomtien Studios in Pattaya. The studios are owned by Jiep, the managing director, who is also Ahnon and Ao's sister. We have a really amazing huge room complete with balcony and en suite, cable tv and air con. Its beautiful. We live here with Ahnon, Ao, Laem the cook, any elephant mahout volunteers who happen to be here, and at the moment, Kop the artist. During the day, Mrs Noi comes to work in the office. We have been made to feel so welcome by them and they have taken us in as part of their family. They are all so friendly. We spend our days doing work on the dusky langur project, designing presentations to ... read more

Kris: After our brief journey to Cambodia it was time to meet up with the monkey project - at last! In the 1st instance this meant not going to the woods...but going to the head office of the organisation that runs the project (Eco Explorer) which is, bizarrely, in Pattaya. Patttaya is just east of Bangkok and is a tourist haven, teeming with expats. The skyline is dominated by high rise hotels and brightlights, the beach is crowded with sun loungers like the Costa Del Sol and the nightlife.....is, err, of the neon light, go-go bar kind. Yeah, it's the sex tourist haven of Thailand. But on the outskirts of town, attached to an elephant camp is a set of appartments called Green Jomtien Studios, which houses the office of Eco Explorer. That's where we headed. ... read more