Due to limited travel from Vientiane to Bangkok, I've arrived back in Thailand's capital with 24 hours to spare before my extremely early flight on Tuesday morning. Had the most AMAZING bus down, my best by far - an overnight one. I think it was tailored as a VIP bus for the Thais, which is really the evuivalent of first class travel for us... cost $20 from Vientiane across the border and all the way here (15hours!), there were 3 seats to a row, not 4, really wi...

Hello All! So I realise there has been around a 1 month hiatus. Sorry about that. And as I am someone who really can't leave things incomplete, it would pain me too much to miss out a big chunk of travel and just pick up from the present moment (10th July right now). Luckily, as you can see from the date on this blog update, the 'Off Exploring' website allows me to go back in time and update blogs with the correct date! So I can now just pick up where I l...

So I don't have much time, as it's all pretty action packed here, and internet access is fairly rare and very expensive!We had 3 days or so in Bangkok after the 'bag at border' fiasco, which luckily solved itself. Quite an incredible city! We weren't quite sure how to feel about it It was like being back in the western world, although actually some aspects felt more developed than London. It felt really quite tainted by the western influence, especially in the nu...

Arrival in Bangkok! Just got here after a pretty gruelling bus journey, around 17 hours, which was NOT the sleeper bus we were expecting, but was actually upright seats, followed by a cramped minibus. Hey ho! The border crossing itself was not easy - it actually ended up taking around 4 hours to get through, as I think they are very diligent and it is obviously a popular crossing point. This included a pretty scary 20 minutes or so where I thought someone had...