Hey guys!

Well first of all i apologise for being so rubbish and not writing this thing until now - 5 weeks since i left home!! Luckily i have my travel journal to remind me of all the exciting, not so exciting and just plain random events so far. Here goes:

When we finally arrived at our first destination, Phuket, we'd already been away for 2 days! As we got off the coach, someone asked us if we wanted to get to PPLN...(???) As we had no idea what they were on about, we said no (it later turned out they were saying Phi Phi Island...well how were we supposed to know!?) We instead asked for directions to Phuket Backpackers, a hostel that sounds like it should be fairly well known...or not, as we spent an entire hour trying to find it in the sweltering heat, complete with 15kg of our lives on our backs! After hearing 5 different sets of directions, we finally found the place, tucked away in a back street full of locals standing by their stalls trying to sell us questionable-looking food... The hostel turned out to be quite nice, at first, until the cockroaches started to make a nice home for themselves in our bathroom - yuckiness!!! We had to get the receptionist to come and get rid of them...i certainly wasn't touching them!

Thankfully we only stayed there for 4 nights, before meeting up with hannah's sis and heading for a lovely air conditioned room in Patong, the most touristy place ever and the complete polar opposite from Phuket Town! We spent our time mainly on the beach whilst there - v hot but uber relaxing :o) Went on a trip to visit James Bond Island, which turned out to just be a rather small rock sticking out of the sea... We went in some inflatable sea canoes around some caves; our paddler man was pointing us out to everyone, shouting "Miss England!" at the top of his voice, so i guess it's no surprise that the next minute a whole boatful of Japanese people started taking photos of us, and only us, as they sailed past...! We went to a Muslim fishing village later, built entirely on stilts - it was really strange walking around and hearing the sea underneath us the whole time. There was a weird woman with a baboon, and chickens and ducks living under the houses among a load of rubbish - certainly very different from home! We went to a temple carved out of rock, that was completely surrounded by monkeys, though none of them actually ventured inside.

The next day we headed to the beach (yes, again!) and came face to face with the weirdest dog ever - its bottom jaw was jutting out significantly from the rest of its face as it appeared to have an unusually small head - it looked sort of like that monster out of Beowulf (which, i might add, is v.v.v. scary in 3D at the Imax!) After the dog had thankfully disappeared, we headed into the sea, after laughing at all the people being knocked over by the waves.....me and Jo got dragged under by the current, and when we finally surfaced (having rearranged our bikinis!) we immediately got sucked straight back under again - Jo ended up doing a sort of headstand, and i scraped all the skin off my knee! Needless to say when we finally escaped we stopped laughing at everyone else!