By the time you get to read this blog, after many months of preparation and planning, we will be in Bangkok. The starting place for our adventure. This is going to be a whole new experience, we have backpacked for three weeks before but had Sharon, Scott and Gary with us to guide us through the tricky moments, now we have six weeks to fend for ourselves, with the minimum amount of clothing possible (less than I take for a weekend back home!) but armed with numerous guide books and a wealth of tales of experiences passed onto us by our chidren!! They both did it for a year or more so surely we'll manage six weeks, won't we? Well at least that's what we told ourselves but then Sharon went and announced that her ... read more

From the ferry we watched sadly as Phi Phi Island slowly dissappeared. Then we turned our thoughts to Bangkok, how much could we fit in, in one day? We arrived at Bangkok airport at 8.30 pm, after a short hopper flight from Krabi Town. the hotel we'd booked in at near the Koh San Road said they would keep our reservation until 10pm. Of course we hadn't anticipated how long the bags would take to come out. Bags retrieved, we bombed down to the meter taxi desk. We showed them the name and address of our hotel and they looked at each other and began laughing. We'd had it on good authority (our daughter) that this hotel was good! We were allocated a taxi, jumped in and sped off. The driver waited until we were on ... read more

Due to the muslim holiday the 9am ferry had been cancelled so the first ferry back from Ao Nang to Phi Phi was at midday. We were glad we'd secured accommodation there in advance. We were suprised as to how quiet the ferry was, as we sailed close to Phi Phi everything now seemed very familiar. We felt glad to be back. We checked back into Anderman Legacy without a hitch and were soon trekking over the rocks to Long Beach. I glanced at my watch several times and thought about poor Sharon and Scott sitting around in Airports. It makes a change though as it's usually us that have to leave some exotic place after a short time while they have months there! All the same it was sad. That night we ended up at ... read more

On Wednesday Sharon and Scott were off extra early as they’d booked a diving trip, Stan and I however decided to slow down and actually stayed in bed until 10am. Once up, after a leisurely breakfast we made our way to Long Beach again. As we’d had a late start we stayed on the beach until almost 6 pm. By the time we got back to the bungalows Sharon and Scott had returned and were fast asleep. I decided to leave them in peace for a while. When Sharon woke up it had gone dark and she thought it was the middle of the night! The long sleep had done them good and we decided to hit the town tonight, after a meal we started off in Carlito’s Bar and watched their fire show but as ... read more

For the last few days, or weeks to be exact, everyone around me has been frantically shopping, baking and generally preparing for Christmas. What have I been doing? Sitting back and dreaming of far distant places, blue seas and sun kissed white sand beaches. Yes, at last, our long awaited dream was about to be fulfilled and just to make it even more perfect Sharon and Scott were going to join us on 'their island' of Ko Phi Phi, Thailand. We arrived at Krabi Airport after nearly 22 hours of travelling and marched outside expecting to be bombarded with taxi touts. Not one in sight! where were they when you needed one? It turned out the only option was to go back inside and queue up at the official desk and be prepared to pay the ... read more