Anyone for Ping Pong?!?

We've now done all the islands (Samui, Phan Ngan and Tao) on the Gulf coast of Thailand which were amazing. They all had their good bits and would highly recommend them to anyone who's heading out this way.
We spent about 6 days on Samui staying at Chaweng Beach. We lived it up a bit here compared to the rest of Asia and treated ourselves quite a lot. We had a really nice room with a/c that had a daily cleaner (which is almost unheard of in most accomodation over here), en-suite bathroom, and situated in a really nice resort. We bought quite a lot of stuff too, but wont bore you with the details!

We mostly just relaxed in Samui, hitting the beach when the weather was good enough. We had a fair amount of overcast and rainy weather while we were here, so just had to sit it out in bars watching movies!

After Samui we caught the ferry to Ko Phan Ngan, which is the island famous for its full moon parties. There wasn't one on when we were there, which I reckon is a good thing judging from the pill popping ravers that were dotted about there anyway! Losers!
The beach here was a lot nicer than the one at Samui but the place on the whole was quite a lot smaller. We travelled around a bit here in the Songthaews to see a bit more of the island, but generally just lazed around on the beach again! :o) We even had a bit of a car chase as well, as some guy hit the side of the van we were in while we were driving, then our driver chased him! Bit scary as the roads are appalling! Another funny thing about it was the guy that hit the van looked like Claude the Scuba instructor from Along Came Polly (Ben Stiller/Jennifer Aniston film). We saw him get away, and then saw him walking down our road about 10 mins later, so he obviously ditched the moped and went to hide. Anyway we left the next day for Koh Tao and who should turn up when we got there - Claude - and guess what, he was a scuba instructor! Guess you really had to be there, but it was very funny!

There was also another funny incident here, which was more funny for Jade than me, which involved a pizza, a lizard and 2 poo's! We were watching a film and I was eating a pizza when I caught something out the corner of my eye and I felt a wet sensation on my leg. I looked at my food and saw something really smooth and brown on the top, which I assumed was a mushroom (No I didn't eat it before you start thinking that!), but was still puzzled about the small wet patch on my leg! I started poking around at the "mushroom" as it looked very suspicious and after closer inspection, and checking the ceiling, we realised that this pretty big lizard had just left me a present on my pizza and weed on my leg! So that was the end of the pizza. The fun didn't stop there though, as after I'd given up on the pizza and just carried on watching the film, another present was kindly given to me in the form of a splat just next to my plate on the table and another wee on my leg! Jade was finding all this very amusing, so I cut my losses and moved seats! Don't I just have all the luck! :o(

Next stop was Koh Tao which is the island more known for its Scuba Diving. I was planning on doing the advanced open water certificate here but money and time was running a little short so just opted for some fun dives. The diving here was pretty good, but it still doesn't live up to Raro standards! I definitely think we were too spoilt going there first!
Other than the diving, we just lazed.......yeah you get the idea!

We then had an 11 hour trip to Bangkok where we are now. The place isn't nearly as bad as everyone was making it out to be. Yeah some areas are a bit annoying offering you ping pong (if you don't know, you don't want to know!) shows, live sex shows, sex movies, and all this was being offered to me while Jade was with me. Although this only happened in one part of Bangkok where we went to a night market at Pat Pong. Other than that, it's a lot cleaner than we expected and were told to expect, and it's not nearly as hectic as Kuala Lumpur.
We are staying on the road just behind Koh San Road which is pretty famous if any of you have heard of it.
Everything is dirt cheap here too and we wished we'd waited to buy some of the stuff we had already bought - oh well!

We've been to the Grand Palace which is amazing, Wat Po which is the reclining Bhudda (45m long), which is also pretty amazing, we saw some other big landmark just across the river from there too, but can't remember what it is called. We've been to Chatachak market which has over 8000 stalls and was a bloody nightmare to try and find anything or even how to get out of the damn thing, Pat Pong market, MBK center (I had to use some serious will power here as the 4th floor is dedicated to gadgets!!!), the whole Siam area, Koa San Road area and loads more. It really is a shoppers heaven here - maybe even more so than Singapore!

We're now just waiting until 6pm for our 11 hour/700km bus journey to Chiang Mai that cost 2.80 pounds, so thought we may as well update the blog!

Not much else to report. Hope everyone is well, and we'll see most of you soon! Only 7 weeks left! :o(

Take care
K&J
xxx

PS I must be browner than I thought I was as I've had 3 or 4 people ask me if I'm Israeli! :o(