It's been a while!!

---

Wow, ok so I have REALLY got behind on this whole posting thing.

I am now officially in Oz, and so much has happened in the past couple of weeks!

First off, after the first treck in Chaing Mai, me and Max travelled to Laos and did our second treck, 'the gibbon experience'. This was.....utterly amazing. Each treck (which was walking through proper rainforest, over slips and slopes and dangerous twists and turns) led us in turn to a new treehouse, built way up at the top of the canopies. These were beautiful, all equipped with a couple of beds, a tree-house proof loo, built in furniture and extraordinary views. To get from tree house to tree house and different bits of the jungle, we took zip-wires, the highest swinging 50ft above the trees across a sky-line of misty mountain tops and colour-splashed skies. This is one of the most adrenalin-rushing, incredible experiences you can imagin, although very strenuous and a bit annoying when you get woken up at half five in the morning to go and look for gibbons that insisted on not making an appearance. Although saying that, zip-wiring in the dark - pretty frickin cool!

Sadly for me, I was also suffering from what was later discovered to be a kidney infection. It had started during the treck in Chaing Mai, but had gotten so bad by the last day of the gibbon exp. that I was bent over in tears and unable to walk the last little bit. Thankfully (because those who were supposed to be my support were disappointingly unwilling) there were some lovely Thai women in our group who offered to escort me back to Bangkok where they were living that same night and take me to a hostpital where they could translate for me. Max informed me he'd meet me at the airport in a couple of days, and so we all travelled back to the Laos border town before me and the Thai women jumped on a boat and headed back to the Thai Border. After that it was a long coach ride and a short plane ride before I was back in Bangkok and lying in a hostpital bed where I stayed for three days. Luckily, it was nothing too serious, and my travel insurance covered it all! So no worries there.

Since then, we have landed in Oz, in the lovely city of Cairns where I have been for just over a week. During this time I also became a qualified diver after doing an advanced open water course on a live aboard boat. It was one of the highlights so far, diving deep down into this other world, surrounded by tropical fish, turtles, sharks....it's hard to really bring across to anyone whose not done it just what the experience is truely like. My diving instructor Dave best described it I think when he said that it's 'the closest you can get to being in space without jumping on a space ship'.

I've also made some fantastic friends these past couple of days, although sadly a lot of them were at the end of their travels and have since gone home. But there are a few who I'll hopefully be bumping into further down along the way.

Gotta keep this post short because Im extremely hungover at the moment (making friends with bar staff is a bloody brilliant method for getting free drinks!) and theres something interesting on the TV, but know that Im missing you all loads!! And I'll try and keep this more up to date from now on!xxxx

---

Comments

[Afghan LORD]

Interesting.....
I red that i enjoyed. www.afghanlord.org

[liam]

picture
Catlin puts pictures in hers :P glad ur ok try not to have too much fun

[vonschnitzel]

Pictures?
Hopefully you've been taking loads of pictures which you'll share with us in due course? One of you hanging on to the elephant would be particularly amusing, I guess!!