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Koh Samui: quite nice, if you avoid the braying hoardes of pissed up (usually English) tourists at the main beaches. We spent our time relaxing on Maenam beach, carefully avoiding the water because:

1. It was murky
2. The beach was dirty
3. There was a surprising amount of remarkably sharp dead coral lurking just beneath the surface

We found that last part out by trying to swim. Oh, the humanity!

In any case, on leaving the islands of Thailand, we decided to try and get to Malaysia in one day. We were told repeatedly that it was possible. And it might have been, if only the thing was organised just a little better. You see, things started to go wrong in every major stopping point along the way. We would be turfed out of the minibus we were in, and then ferried around town in a variety of rickety, often open-aired vehicles until we arrived at the next working minibus, possibly detouring to a few places that sell "the best fried chicken" or to a minibus that had given up the ghost.

On one memorable occasion, we spent an hour and a half being shunted from place to place within the same town, only to meet up with the people who had been in the minibus that we had just left, to climb on to the minibus that we had all journeyed on before. Most strange. And Holly had to sit in the back, because the monk refused to be anywhere near a woman (it's a religeous thing, and had nothing to do with the fact that I'd been travelling for a day in a hot bus)

And, no, it's not possible to get from the islands to the Kotu Bharu in one go. You can spend the night in a delightful border town, complete with an elephant doing tricks for the tricks down the red light district. But at least the following morning you can walk across to Malaysia, armed with 50RM that you'd not spent from the last time you were there three years ago.

We have now passed our Open Water PADI course.

When diving, it's normal to swim with a buddy who's there to make sure that if something goes amiss you've got some sort of backup. Naturally, I learnt to dive with buddy Holly.

Bangkok is fine, but what Holly and I really wanted to do was to learn to dive. After a couple of days sight-seeing we had cold feet, so purchased the bus and boat tickets that would take us to Koh Tao, the diving capital of Thailand. In all our travels, people had raved about how good the diving around the island was, and how cheap the courses were, so that newbies such as us could get to grips with things without too much hassle or expense.

This explains why we found ourselves on enormously choppy seas, sheltering behind a pitifully ineffective screen as our speed boat, filled to the gunwales with tourists, bounced, leapt, rocked and rolled towards the island at some unearthly hour of the morning (lets not even mention the hour and a half spent listening to the Carpenters before the boat jetty opened) We had been speaking with James, one of the tour reps who was on the boat with us. He suggested that we take a look at Nangyan Island because the rooms were meant to be lovely, the rates not too bad and because we smiled so much we could get a couple of free fun dives after we'd completed our Open Water PADI course. Working out how much we had expected to spend on Koh Tao, it seemed like a good idea.

There was another reason why getting off at Koh Nangyuan was a good idea, and it has a lot to do with the fact that we were stopping there first. You see, some of the other tourists were from SE Asia, and for whatever reason they were appalling travellers. So appalling that the captain ran out of leak proof, translucent plastic bags that they could use to keep their breakfasts in once they'd choked them back out. Frankly, sitting on a boat for an hour while miserably wet, surrounded by the gentle stench of vomit, the soft, wet splashing noise of the same matter sloshing into and around bags and a 180 degree field of view filled with the wretchedly hurling, is not my idea of fun. So we got off the boat ASAP.

The island itself was amazing. It consists of three lumps of rock, joined by two arms of sandy beach. The beaches shift and change with the seasons, and at high tide one of them disappears under the waves --- you can either wade to over where it should be, or hop on to a dinghy attached to a stout rope and haul yourself over, should you need to. Obviously, we did, because we were staying in a little hut on one of the lumps of rock. The hut was one of several that had been built so as not to disrupt the surrounding forest too much, so firstly the view from our hut was stunning, and secondly the view from everywhere else wasn't marred with concrete. We loved it.

After our time in Cambodia, we returned to Bangkok at the cheerful time of 11 in the evening. Thankfully, Bangkok is a 24 hour city, so finding accomodation shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong. You see, we still have some basic standards that must be met, one of these being the price and the other one being the cleanliness of the room (madness, I know!) I ended up hiding Holly in a bar with the bags and hunted around by myself, finding somewhere nice enough at about 2 in the morning.

Once we had slept, we decided to finish off our sight-seeing of the city and found something curious. Although we had hated Bangkok when we were first there, we quite liked it now. Maybe it had something to do with having seen so much worse (not mentioning Vietnam), maybe it was because the people were mostly quite nice, maybe it was just that it was a relief to be somewhere where the roads were fine, or maybe there was no reason to it. Who knows? We didn't, but we liked it.

So, if you ever want to go to Bangkok and enjoy it, go, leave, and then come back. But make sure that you catch a tuk-tuk the first time you're there.

We've now seen more elephants, by virtue of going to the Thai Elephant Sanctuary near Lamphung. This entailed getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning (though I stayed in bed until 6.30, because I'm fundamentally a lazy sod) and trying to catch public transport to the place. Everything was going fine until we tried to leave Chiang Mai --- the guide books that we have are fundamentally flawed in their descriptions about how to get there. Still, we managed to get past this particular problem eventually and spent a bone-shaking hour and a half on an un-airconditioned bus anxiously peering out of the window, wondering if we were nearly there yet.

We shouldn't have worried: the bus driver ground the bus to a halt just beside some large statues of elephants (not small things to start with) and waved his hands around until we got off, before departing, grinning, waving and ambling into heavy traffic.

A two kilometre walk, and we were in the park, starving. First order of the day was to get some food. This plan was somewhat thwarted because the restaurant was full of people on "home stay" at the place (yes, you too can live and worjk with the elephants, should you wish too) and a bus load of not terribly pleasant Aussies (fat, old, overly loud, etc) After eating we went to the elephant hospital.

It turns out that this was one of the heart-breaking things you can do, because there was a baby elephant there, that they were trying to persuade to nurse from its mother. He had fallen into a hole one night 7 weeks ago, and his back legs were paralysed. Consequently, he was held up in a sling, and looked terribly unhappy and deeply uncomfortable, especially because this is a rare injury for elephants, and the sling, being a make-shift affair, had caused him some nasty bed-sores.

After we made our way out, however, we ran into the home-stays again. They were off to learn how to ride elephants properly, and we were invited to sit and watch them. Of course, we sat and watched in just the wrong (or right, depending on your point of view) spot, just beside a big container of bananas and sugar cane. Now, our previous experience with elephants had taught us that they are greedy animals, constantly seeking their next treat. Holly and I were sitting next to an almost unguarded sweet shop...!

Running out of time now, but suffice it to say, we fed them (covering our hands in elephant mucus in the process), looked at them, stroked them and generally learnt a lot about them. Holly walked away in a happy daze. I walked away gently wiping as much liquid off my hand as discreetly as possible.

After our return to Chiang Mai with the other trekkers, we decided to meet up in the evening for a meal. The guide, Bon, recommended a restaurant to go to, and gave us the name on a piece of paper in both English and Thai, saying that a tuk-tuk driver would be able to find it.

In a way, Bon was right, though it did take us slightly over an hour to do a journey that in reality could have been done in 5 minutes. On the plus side, we got to see an awful lot of the town....

Bon ordered the food at the restaurant, and it was fantastic, but laced with a vast quantity of chilli. We were laughingly told that the food had been prepared with very little of the spice, so heaven alone knows how hot it might have been.

As a side note, it's useful to sit at the head of the table --- you get fed beer all evening.

We've now returned from our trekking, tired but both glad that we'd done it. Holly loved the elephant riding, which was made more interesting by the fact that our elephant was keen to get a snack in at the drop of a hat, grabbing a trunk-full of bamboo leaves whenever no-one was paying him enough attention. Naturally, this involved a somewhat ungainly trot, leaving Holly and I clinging to our precarious perch with white knuckles!

The trekking itself was extremely hard work, involving hiking up seemingly vertical jungle paths, only to descend by equally steep paths down the other side. It would appear that where we'd be tempted to use some sort of switchback, to lessen the graident, the Thai's don't worry themselves with the extra work and just go for the straight line approach. Despite the sweating, there were some amazing views, though, and if you're fit then I'd recommend that you go along, if you get the chance.

We spent the first night in a Karen village, sleeping on the floor of one of the teak houses on stilts that appear to be the traditional Thai housing. I slept perfectly well, but Holly found sleeping on a hard woen floor without a pillow or much padding a difficult experience. The Karen people were lovely to us, and we had a fair proportion of the village in the house with us until the small hours. They make their own "moonshine" whiskey, and after a while they started bringing out bottles of the stuff. It was lethal!

The trekking the next day ended by about 1, so we spent the rest of the day relaxing at the hut we'd stopped at. It was just by a river, so three of us went off with the guide to muck around in it. While we were there, the guiide returned with a circualr fishing net, the kind that you throw, with weights around the edge so it sinks to the bottom. Despite spending two or three hours practising, we only magaed to catch one (rather small!) fish, though Holly managed to grab some photos, which should come out well.

In the evening, we helped build part of the bamboo raft we were going to use the next day. The raft basically consisted of long lengths of bamboo lashed together with strips of more bamboo. We werre exceptionally pleased that they appeared to be practically unsinkable, even with lots of people standing on them.

The next day we found out how wrong that impression was, when we went down some white water. Because it was so shallow, and because we hit random rocks, the raft started coming apart. By the end of the trip, one of us was holding the back of the thing together and Holly was desperately trying to lash up the middle of it. Despite these efforts, we still managed to loose about a third of the width of the raft.

When we weren't in danger of sinking, the trip down the river was lovely. The sun was out, and the only sounds you could hear were from the river and the jungle. Two of us (a Canadian called Bart and myself) took it in turns to punt the raft down the river, with a Thai guide at the front doing a lot of the legwork too. Whenever we were in the rapids, the punting turned more to "fending off" which took a surprsing amount of effort.

I am slowly weaning Holly onto iced coffee, Thai-style. This consists of a shot of espresso coffee, sweetened condensed milk and lots of ice. It's a little unsual when you first drink it, but it grows on you.

The past couple of days have been interesting. We've started doing a tour of the millions (okay, 400-ish) Wats that Chiang Mai has, as well as finding nice places to relax and eat. The number of Wats is surprising because the place really isn't that large --- Holly likens it to Norwich!

At Wat Pra Singh, we spent an instructive half hour or so chatting to one of the monks. He approached us to talk about football and Jack fruit and ended up telling us about the 227 edicts by which a Bhuddist monk must live by (more if you happen to be a woman, though that's not an issue here in Thailand)

Today we went on a Thai cooking course because there wasn't space to go on one of the trekking tours and my feet are aching (blisters from hell; one Thai happily exclaimed that my "shoes are eating my feet", which though hardly flattering was true) We're now fully versed in how to make green curry paste, cook various spicy dishes and are both feeling generally pretty stuffed. Durien fruit is definitely an aquired taste. It's the end of the season, so the one we had wasn't the best, but *shudder*

Tomorrow we're setting off with a bunch of other tourists on a "non touristic" tour of the jungle. We're packed, and ready to go!

We've spent the past few days relaxing in Chiang Mai, and we're starting to feel a lot happier about life in general. The train ride up here was stately and reasonably comfortable, even in second class. I would advise that only people who can stay particularly still while sleeping sleep on the top bunk, because it's clearly been designed for narrow and short Thai people.

We're staying in the Eagle Guest House, in a lovely room with a private bathroom for about 150B a night. For those of you not in Thailand, that boils down to about 2 quid a night. Wow! Even better, it's got kittens, one of whom has become our firm companion whenever we sit under the mango tree outside (though he studiously ignores us until he can ambush us from the bushes or maul my laces) Very cute indeed, and he's well looked after, judging by his coat. The same can't be said for some of the packs of stray dogs that roam the streets....

We're going to be holed up here while we wait for our visas to Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia to be processed, so we're going to take the opportunity to go trekking in the nearby moutains. Holly is very pleased to be doing this because we get to do an elephant ride, and, it turns out, she never realised how much she liked elephants until she could see one!