Firstly, Happy New Year!

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and start to 2012!

I'm not even sure where to start with my two weeks....maybe the beginning. So I met Sophie and her two friends on 22nd December with Becky and Josie on the island of Koh Phiphi. After a mad 5 minutes of being reunited, shortly afterwards it was as if we hadn't been away from each other for 5 months!

We started the holiday by going straight out and trying the infamous buckets of Thailand. These are drinks, but instead of glasses, you drink out of buckets... My advice would be to drink them very slowly and definitely start off by sharing! Over the next couple of days we spent the days on the beach and on Christmas eve we went to Maya beach which is a small island where the film 'The Beach' was filmed. It was so so pretty, although the sea was quite choppy going over and in a small fisherman's boat it didn't feel the safest of transport. Was fun all the same! Christmas day we spent half of in bed as the night before, instead of traditionally going to the half moon we enjoyed more buckets on the beach and so had seen the first few hours of Chirstmas already. Was quite surreal dancing on a beach with fireworks (better than Sherborne Castle!) and a sea of Christmas hats surrounding us! So Christmas day was a nice relaxed day with a drink and a Christmas dinner of pizza on the beach in the afternoon and in the evening chilling out once again on the beach on pillows. We still managed to stay out until 5 in the morning. I think this was the turning point of becoming nocturnal!

On the 27th we did the long journey of going to the other island of Koh phangan, which is where the full moon parties are held. We weren't going to be there for a full moon, but it is where we celebrated New Years eve! After a horrible boat crossing where I'm surprised that none of us were sick we made it to our accommodation that we had already booked. However we had booked two rooms of three but were given two rooms with two beds with two tiny mattresses on the floor! We only stayed one night and decided to find a much cheaper hostel, which we did.... It was a 30 bed dorm, pretty much on the beach and the beds were even worse than the mattresses on the floor in the last place! FYI always check the beds before paying! It was fine though and was much cheaper. Also, with being now nocturnal, we weren't too bothered about the beds! The week here was mad, but we did manage to do another boat tour on the first day. We went around different beaches and tried snorkelling but the visibility was terrible! There were parties all night leading up to New years eve, with new years being the busiest of all! We heard that apparently 30,000 people were on the island that night, we even met some of the actors from Neighbours which was very random! The plan was, which was thought up by Sophie Miles was to stay up all night until the sun rise. I was the only one to succeed out of our group, but I ended up waking them up at 6 in the morning and they all very willingly got back out of bed and continued to dance on the beach. It was so much fun! New Years day was like being in a zombie town! The majority of the people had left the island in the early hours of the morning, it was all very strange.

Sophie, Emma and Rachel left early in the morning of the 2nd to go on to another island. We had planned to leave later that day, but when we got to our boat and could see our boat docked at the port, we were told we couldn't get on as it was 'full' even though we had booked our tickets days ago. So we ended up having to spend another night in the horrible bed hostel! We eventually managed to get back to the mainland, where there had been lots of flooding and flew out of Krabi on the 4th to spend 12 hours in Kuala lumpur airport!

Finally we have made it back to DG where I am very happy to be back in my little jungle bubble! The weather is terrible and I think the flooding will get worse but it's good to be back. Although we were welcomed by a room smelling of mould and mum, a rat has chewed on the robin christmas decoration you sent me! Got to love living in the forest....

Lots of love!

xxx