great small islands: koh payam koh jum koh yao noi surin islands koh lipe and koh tarautao national marine park koh mak must experience: tuk tuk ride elephant ride swim in waterfall massage swim in warm sea travel by longtail boat watch thai ladyboy/drag cabaret visit a temple with a thai person beach monkeys best beaches: aow yai bay, koh payam pranang bay, railey thongson bay, koh samui laem singh cove, phuket ao suan yai, koh mak [View Full Entry]

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like most other tourist hotspots around the world, thailand has its share of rip offs, scams and scammers, here are my top 20 i'd like to warn everyone about. mainly, but not exclusively to be found in tourist places. it is a bit of a devil's advocate list, but here goes: 1 never enter into a conversation with a stranger in the street in a tourist area, if they initiated it, they probably only want to sell you third rate product/service at a premium over inflated price, be it "massaaaaaaage", sex, a taxi/tuk tuk, fake tourist tat, dodgy gems etc 2 [View Full Entry]

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Welcome all, to my last blog of what has turned out to be 18 months of travelling overland (not a single flight!) to and around mainland south east asia, an eventful time indeed... for next thursday night (26th february), ekk and i will board a Etihad airlines flight bound for london (via abu dhabi). it is also the first flight i've taken since april 2007, so slightly apprehensive... i wrote my last blog from the southern thai city of hat yai at the beginning of january, after just coming back from koh lipe for new years eve. ekk and i spent [View Full Entry]

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HAPPY NEW YEAR, from hat yai! welcome to my first blog of 2009, and the probably the penultimate one before Ekk and i return to the UK at the end of next month.. since i last spoke, i helped ekk celebrate his 35th birthday in hua hin, helped by some duty free famous grouse whisky, a large chocolate cake from siam paragon and 5 puppies! i then left hua hin by train to thung song junction, from where it is a short bus journey to krabi town. i could have got off at surat thani, but couldnt face the touts and [View Full Entry]

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i am now in hua hin, having safely arrived from bangkok last night. its been quite an long and very varied adventure since my last blog from phuket.... i spent another 12 days in phuket. i had a great time there, so much so in fact, that i am going back there next week, to spend my 40th birthday, christmas and new year.... should be fun! spent the evenings seeing a lot of lip synching ladyboy cabaret, maybe too much, mainly in kiss bar, but also other establishments. boat bar sadly continues be become less popular, it is a shame, but [View Full Entry]

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im now in phuket again, after spending the time since the last blog with travelling around southern thailand with ekk. after spending a week in bangkok and hua hin generally being depressed about the delays and bureaucracy and sheer bloody mindedness of the procedures involved in getting ekk a uk visa, we took the lomprayah cateraran to koh pangnan. we stayed on hat yao beach in the far north west of the island, at the shiralea backpackers resort, a new place with great beds and a pool for 500bht a night. it's not right on the beach, but near enough. some [View Full Entry]

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welcome again to my blog, i am back in Bangkok again, with my friend Ekk, after a solo foray to Laos and Cambodia. more on what's happened in Bangkok later... meanwhile let me regail you of the tale of the past 2 weeks of my travels, to pastures mainly new... after my last blog from Pakxe, which is the main town in southern Laos. i spent a couple more days there, enjoying the hassle free and laid back ambiance, that is so typical of Laos. i wanted to visit the Bolaven Plateau, an elevated area east of the town, notable for [View Full Entry]

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hello, massage, welcome.... now i am alone in the small town of Pakxe in laos, having travelled here from north-eastern thailand yesterday. after my last blog from hat yai 4 weeks ago, it has been a rather drama filled time! i took the bus from hat yai to phuket, a slow 6 hour journey on winding roads. it was made worse by the driver being in a inappropriate race with a competitor company's bus on the section between krabi town and phang-nga town. resulting in several sharp brakes and swerves, much to mine and fellow passengers chagrin! phuket town has one [View Full Entry]

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i am now back in Thailand having just spent the past 3 weeks in Malaysia and Singapore. after my last blog from Hat Yai, in far southern thailand, i took the direct overnight sleeper train from there to Kuala Lumpar, as my thai visa had expired. the ticket was only 518baht (about 8GBP). Although it starts in Hat Yai, it is a Malaysian train, with initially just two passenger carriages attached to the back of a very long and extremely slow goods train. the goods carriages are replaced by a lot more passenger ones at the Thailand/Malaysian border. compared with the [View Full Entry]

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im now in the southern Thai city of Hat Yai, having arrived here saturday afternoon with my friend ekk. we got here by boat and bus from the island of koh muk, off the coast of Trang province, in south-western thailand. soon after my last blog i left bangkok for koh samet, a tiny but very popular island off the thai eastern seaboard. the reason for that was that a friend we had met on koh samui in june, had invited us to spend some time there. we arrived on the bus from bangkok (only about 3 hours), to the port [View Full Entry]

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