DavidMace

Pai is a little backpacker town about 3 hours from Chaing Mai. We arrived on the 11th March and stayed at Happy House Guesthouse. Whilst in Pai we rented motorbikes and went to see Pai Canyon, a waterfall and again more temples. It started out really well on the bikes – it was a boiling hot day then in the afternoon the weather changed and it started torrentially raining which made riding the bikes quite difficult. There was half moon party on in the jungle whilst we were there. This was good, involved us getting drunk once again and therefore, Hayley walking around with her top inside out for the majority of the night and me hungover for 2 days once again!! We stayed for 5 nights in total, without really doing that much except chilling ... read more

We left PhiPhi about 12:30pm on the 1st March and arrived in Bangkok at 7am the next day. As per usual, we had to walk around for ages, half asleep trying to get a room (remind me why we don’t book in advance again?!). We stayed at Lucky Guesthouse which was okay – although Hayley got bedbug bites from here. We stayed 4 nights in Bangkok but didn’t actually do a lot. We went to the Siam shopping malls which are really big with lots of western shops – this excited Hayley. We also went to Pantip Plaza, which is a massive IT mall and brought a netbook – this exited me. We did a lot of walking up and down Khao San Road buying new clothes. We bumped into some people from Langkawi and spent ... read more

We travelled to Krabi on the 24th Feb, it was only an hour away from Khao Sok so we got a minivan to Krabi town then a long boat to East Railay Beach. After wondering around for 2 hours trying to find a room we managed to get a room at Yaya Resort. That afternoon we headed to the beach and had a few Beer Changs later on. We decided to go snorkelling on our first full day in Krabi. We booked on an afternoon/evening snorkelling tour. We did the usual snorkelling but also got to do it at night and you get to see the phosphorus in the water (what happens is the water glows whenever you move – it feels like you are at a rave). Whilst snorkelling, I got a bit lost from ... read more

We arrived on Koh Phangan at about 6am on the 16th February following a bus to Krabi (from Koh Lanta), another minibus to Surat Thani and finally a night ferry to Koh Pangan. It was a fairly painless if quite long journey. The night ferry was a claustrophobic experience - you were unable to stand. We were a bit worried we would struggle to find accommodation as the full moon party was on the 19th but there was a tout at the dock who recommended Haad Guard Resort – we got a taxi there and managed to get a room right on the beach for 400baht a night (with a hot shower which is a luxury whilst travelling the islands). On our first full day we did a trip which involved having a monkey climb all ... read more

On the 7th February, after spending 2 nights in Trang we decided to go move onto Koh Mook, a small island just off Trang. This involved a minibus then our first (of many) trip on a Thailand longboat to Koh Mook. After arriving on a beautiful beach we set off to look for accommodation, when I say set off to look I actually mean accepting the first place we saw despite it being one of the most expensive we had stayed in to date at 800 Baht a night. The next day we went on a trip on a longboat to the Emerald Cave, this involved swimming for about 5 minutes through a cave with only the guide's torch to see where we were going before emerging in a beautiful lagoon. This really was an amazing ... read more