Hi everyone,

Sadly, this is the last blog of our travels and rather than being written in some far-flung corner of the globe, is being typed in the not so-exotic Kent - but, hey at least the sun is shining!

We left Laos to yet another soaking as we drove to the airport in a tuk-tuk during the height of their new year festival, only to arrive to the Songkran Water festival in Chiang Mai (As buddist nations they both celebrate the Lunar New Year). As we quickly discovered throwing water over everyone, but especially the tourists, is the name of the game here as in Laos, but the size of Chiang Mai means this is taken to a whole new level - it's like descending into Waterworld for a few days! We headed out to watch a huge colourful procession with groups dressed up in traditional dress to represent the different regions of Northern Thailand and inevitably were soaked withing minutes - well I was any way. Seemingly it's much more fun to soak women, as Alex got sprayed just a few times whilst I had people chasing me around with buckets! Still, it was nice and refreshing, especially when they added ice to the water, crept up behind you and tipped it down your spine!

After the parade, we headed to the Tha Phae gate where huge crowds had gathered around stages and alomg the edges of the moat to eat, drink and, of course, get wet. It was a case of 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em', so we invested in some super-soakers and joined in the revellries. A continuous line of pick-up trucks crawled along the streets, all packed to overflowing with locals armed with water pistols, buckets and huge casks of water. It was an amazing carnival atmosphere, and the party goes on for several days.

Once the festival was over we booked ourselves onto a Thai cooking course and spent a day learning how to cook everything from Spring rolls and varoius curries to Sticky Rice and Mango (a delicious pudding). We got to eat everything we cooked and everyone on the course shared the different dishes they'd prepared so by the end of the day we had eaten so much we needed to be rolled out of the kitchen! Hopefully we'll be able to recreate some of the dishes now we are home - any victims who'd like to volunteer to try them please let us know...

Our final day in Chiang Mai was spent on a day trip to see some hill tribe villages which was pretty touristy but still interesting to see how they live. We had hoped to go on a longer trek to get to some of the more remote hill tribes but as I was still recovering from the illness caused by those damn malaria tablets thought 2-3 days of hard-core trekking probably wasn't wise. The highlight of this daytrip though was bamboo rafting along rapids on a raft made of 10 logs of bamboo strapped together, and elephant trekking through the forest. The elephant trekking was amazing although a little scary in places as we nearly slid off the elephant as it slowly ambled down steep slopes to the river banks. We also got covered in mud as the elephants keep spraying it on their stomachs to keep themselves cool and kept managing to cover us too!

After the ride we all bought big bunches of bananas to feed the elephants to reward them for carrying us through the forest. They were all very greedy and we had to try to keep the bunch of banans hidden from view and feed them one at a time otherwise they would have had the whole lot in one go.

Due to the continuing problems in Bangkok we decided to cheat and fly to Bangkok rather than travel overland and treated ourselevs to a cheap hotel near Khoa San Road with a swimming pool on the roof. Our last couple of days were spent cooling off in the pool, trying to eat and drink as much Thai food and fresh fruit juices as possible, and honing our haggling skills in the night market.

We can't quite believe that our 7 month trip has finally come to an end. On our last evening we sat in a bar trying to decide on our favourite places and moments of the trip and came to the conclusion that there are just too many highlights to pick just one or two. We've had some amazing experiences, met many wierd and wonderful people and think we'll spend the rest of our lives saying 'ooh, do you remember when...'.

Thanks for all the messages from back home whilst we were away and if we haven't caught up with you yet we'll be round to bore you with our 1000s of photos soon!