right, after vietnam we went back to bangkok and had a great time riffling through all sorts of bargains at the weekend market, 6000 stalls selling dogs, cats, rats, clothes, lifesize iron monsters, fake flowers, etc etc. We took a bud down to phuket, dreaming of clean sandy beaches and nice stylish bars and ended up in the red light district full of dirty old perverts hanging around with a bunch of prostitutes and lady boys and a surprising about of chavvy european families... needless to say we got the first bus out the next morning to ko pha ngan, the island where they have the infamous full moon parties where 10000 people turn up and stay on the beach all night - i only made it to 5 am and had to go home as i was exhausted! good fun though, and i bumped into a few friends from warwick which was cool too. Yesterday we got to malaysia, which wasn't in the original plan but we realise indonesia wasn't a wise option what with the plane crashes and ferry sinking being a weekly occurance! so we've been wandering round a colonial town in the north west which is really pretty, hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to book tickets to kanye west's concert in kuala lumpar on sunday, if not we'll be going over to cameron highland which look stunning, apparently there are waterfalls and mountains etc - should be good.

we're counting down the days to australia now - we've got three weeks as we fly out on 26 april into sydney, so we've been trying to work out our route around - we're thinking sydney, ayers rock, cairns down to brisbane for a bit of scuba diving then flying from brisbane to darwin to go to all the western national parks where they have all the odd geography, then down to perth to fly to melbourne to do some wine tours, then back to sydney before new zealand! however, this is all theory rather than practise as we have no idea if we'll be able to cover those distances in two months! it's huge!! right, must go, hope i haven't bored you too much! xx