After making it back across the mighty Mekong and through immigration without anything untoward happening we headed into Chiang Khong and straight to the bus station to catch the next available bus to Chiang Rai. To our utter dismay the next bus proved to be one of the local buses - which basically meant no air con, small plastic seats and very cramped - which made the 3hr journey seem to go on forever. Smelly, hot and tired we eventually arrived in Chiang Rai and headed for a hotel, the Tourist Inn, which had been recommended to us by Mel, one of our tree house companions. At 250 baht (£4.50) a night we felt we had a good deal and, as they had a small bakery which provided a nice breakfast, we were very happy. As ... read more

The next stage of the adventure got off to a really slow start, mainly caused by the after effects of too much of the local brew and a late night, luckily we had built a day’s chilling and planning into our action packed itinerary. The next day we rose early and headed off to the Northern Bus Terminal. As a small digression, when you visit Thailand you will notice that almost every bus station or terminal, even in small towns, are miles and miles away from the town centres. I’m not sure why this is, it makes no sense but an explanation was offered to us that the conglomerates (for the want of a better phrase) that control the tuk-tuks, taxis and travel services hold significant sway in the country, and help ‘shape’ planning permission. Whatever ... read more

Well our first impressions of Cambodia were positive, the wonderful temples and Siem Reap is a nice, fun town, but that is definitely where the positives stopped. We didn’t really talk about the other side of Siem Reap in the last blog, that’s the town where bus loads of wealthy tourists (mainly Japanese) are shipped in, put up for 1 or 2 nights in an increasing number of luxury hotels, Marriott, Sheraton, Hilton, etc, all of whom charge you about $300 per night for the pleasure, this in a country where that is the average ANNUAL wage. This explosion of tourism would be great if any of the money went to help Cambodians create a better life for themselves but it just disappears into the pockets of possibly the most corrupt regime on the face of ... read more

Well, as we feared, the bus was late, about an hour, and this meant missing the Ferry, luckily though Ko Samui, being so busy has pretty good transports links. We left Phang Nga on a local bus only to be dumped in Surat Thani, which turned out to be about 20K away from where the ferry leaves from, why they don’t build their towns/cities nearer the sea intrigues us, it seems such a waste, almost everywhere that you get the ferry to/from is actually nowhere near the sea. No hopping off like Weymouth, Portsmouth or any port in the Western World really. We were now on the eastern side of Thailand in the Gulf of Thailand having said goodbye to the Andaman Sea. The ferry plonked us on Ko Samui, in a town called Nathon. Most ... read more

Sorry we haven’t posted for a while but, as you can read here, we haven’t really done a lot and it’s been great as we at last have our holiday within our holiday. We caught a cheap flight from Bangkok to Phuket, having only really heard of the island via Holiday programmes and coverage of the Tsunami. Our main reason for staying on Phuket, apart from checking it out was that Chris wanted to look at the possibility of getting a knee op, as Thailand is a popular destination for medical tourism. We booked into a little hotel in Phuket Town in the centre of the island and set off to check out the beaches. After asking advice we were told that Kata Beach was the prettiest and quietest, so we hopped on a songthaew (local ... read more