Have you ever been in a small saloon car with 7 other fully grown adults eating spiders, whilst travelling at about 120km per hour (well that is what one can assume you are travelling at considering the speedometer has no needle)?.............we have! After braving the aircon VIP bus which was neither aircon nor VIP (surprised..not us) we travelled from Siem Reap 7 hours to Phnom Penh where it was decided that we would get a "share taxi" to Kampot in South Eastern Cambodia. The trips between places in Cambodia have been my favourite yet. As well as travelling on local transport [View Full Entry]

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I am not sure what we expected from Cambodia. The French influence is very clear (well you would have to be stupid to miss it when the women almost beat you with Baguettes until you relent and buy one). Having left a paradise island to stepping into (literally) open sewers, dirty roads and begging children gave Lara "culture shock" for the first time since we have left. It was short lived but it took a couple of hours for us to get used to our new "home". Siem Reap is actually all about Angkor and the temples. The town is very [View Full Entry]

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We had heard the horror stories of the bus to Cambodia. Armed raids to rob you of your belongings, a 17 hour trek across the worst tracks ever, corrupt officials at the border, bus scams leaving you stranded at horrible guesthouses until you paid more money....Well at least some of the above are not true or at least did not happen to us! We started thinking perhaps this was a necessary 'right of passage', then we thought "Are we CRAZY?" The journey started off pretty badly to begin with. Leaving Ko Phi Phi was hard enough as it was. You must [View Full Entry]

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Ok, so we have realised that it is not just our nearest and dearest who read this blog thanks to some random e-mails from people of the world. Just for the record, we are really quite respectable citizens who do not habitually pee in canoes or eat testicles for a living.....(looking back it appears to be mainly Lara who has disgraced herself for your amusement....so not all things change then). Anyway, we arrived down South again and for a change Ko Pha Ngan was cloudy...but not for long. Cheered itself up very respectfully and we scored ourselves a lovely beach bungalow [View Full Entry]

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Today was a good day. We are in Bangkok for a day and night before our flight to Ko Samui. Khao San Road is actualy a pretty cool place to be despite our earlier criticisms in our last blog on Bangkok. The best thing about today was that it felt like we were normal people again. We had a few little errands to do such as going to the bank in perparation for Cambodia to get dollars - they don't like their own currency there and the post office and stuff. We managed to squeeze in a traditional massage in the [View Full Entry]

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Elephants, Rafts, Canadians and Pig's Testicles. All of the above have one thing in common.... our hill trek in Northern Thailand. Our trek promised to be non-touristy and in the main held out well. It was actually more of a trek than we had imagined (Lara was thinking of a gentle stroll in the hills which of course would be flat - which part of hill and trek does she not understand - the girls supposed to be quite bright!!), but instead we were pouring with sweat within minutes, wading through rivers and climbing up near mountains (Lara's words). At first [View Full Entry]

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Nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains 135 km from Chiang Mai, Pai (pronounced "by") is the hippy mecca of the whole of South-East Asia. We have been staying in a round bamboo hut on stilts on the banks of the Pai River, with a hammock on the balcony and nothing but a mattress on the floor inside. The pace of life is slow and relaxed, with everyone incapable of much more than mooching. It is easy to see why people end up staying weeks, and even months, here. We had only intended to stop here to break the bone rattling [View Full Entry]

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Whilst in Chang Mai we had to go to Burma for the day to extend our Visa's. Fairly boring but needed to be done. The trip was a standard tour trip which enabled us to cross the border and back again. We took in the usual hot springs, although here locals were cooking eggs in them, some ruined (old, not broken) temples and a token trip to the "Golden Triangle". This is the border point between Laos, Thailand and Burma - marked by the Mekong River. So although it was a long and uneventful day, on the positive side we now [View Full Entry]

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Well, we have been in Thailand for a month now (and away for 65 days!) and have worked our way up to Chang Mai in Northern Thailand. Second in size to Bangkok, although they share no other features at all! The old city of CM (where we live) is a neat square bounded by moats and remants of a medieval style wall rasied 700 years ago to defend against Burmese invaders. Although a million tuk tuks circumnavigate the old city, narrow bricked soi (lanes) branch off into a sleepy quiet village of fruit tree gardens, dusty school yards, pushcarts and slow [View Full Entry]

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What a refreshing change of scenery! Leafy Kanchanaburi is nested beside craggy limestone mountains and the Mae Nam Khwae (Kwai River). The town is small, peaceful and exudes an unmistakeable khwaam pen thai (thai-ness). Check out our increasing grasp of the thai language - we will be fluent within 3 weeks! The primary reason to visit here for us was that our brains having been fried down south needed an injection of culture and history. Kanchanaburi is a town with a tragic past as the site of a World War II Prisoner of war camp where we have come to pay [View Full Entry]

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