Today we ventured north towards the border with Burma on an excursion. The plan involved visiting an elephant sanctuary, an Orchid farm and a Burmese tribe called the Long Necks. Our guide showed up at the hotel in true Thai fashion, 20 minutes late, and introduced himself as Ping Pong, because his real name was far too long. This made us sound like a bunch of racists for the rest of the day, whenever we addressed him. We stopped to pick up a group of 6 America...

James and I have just installed ourselves into an internet café as there is no access at our hotel. It was brilliant to see that a good few of you are sharing our trip and lovely to hear from back home. We all had a great time in Bangkok despite the frequent hijackings. Really weird to see Christmas trees and snowmen everywhere, and everyone wishing us happy new year. Alongside this, the whole country is in mourning over the King's sister who died last week...

It's day 3 and we are still chasing the ever elusive Nintendo DS Lite. It's was an early start for us all this morning so that we could get across town to the "Duty Free" shopping centre in a hope that Sherie could claim her prize. The journey took us around 30 minutes of which we spent most of the time trying to tell the taxi driver to take us straight to the shopping centre, and that we weren't interested in buying Thai Silk! We made it, and lo and be...

Needless to say, we were all pretty shattered and were looking forward to a solid night's sleep. Ha! Tony and I were both wide awake at 2am. We had drunk our whole stock of coffee and tea by 6am - including the Earl Grey and the Green Tea and went to breakfast at 6.30. By 9am we had been for a walk through Bangkok city to a small park (Lumphini) packed with joggers and old folks doing Tai Chi. Even this early, there are families picnicing. We also saw a 4-5ft lon...

Well it's day 1, and what a long day it has been. Started off leaving Heathrow at 10pm and landing in Thailand at 9am UK time. The flight was uneventful, apart from one passenger's chair kept reclining and the cabin staff fixed it with a plastic knife. Genius! We made it to our hotel around 6.30 pm (11.30am GMT) where a mob of bell boys surrounded the car and took all our cases away. By the time we were checked in we had just enough time to slot in a couple of f...