Thought i'd better fill you in in what i did during this time so here goes:

We travelled up from Bangkok to Chiang Mai on an overnight train (a group of 8 of us, me, tom, two english girls jo and sarah, an aussie couple and a south african couple). This reminded me of morocco a lot! oh the memories! we arrived and had a day spare there in which we all decided to do a thai cooking course! this was fantastic although most of the food was too spicy for me. It was made even better byt the lady boy teacher of the group next to us!

The next day we started our journey into the jungle on the back of a truck on very windy roads and walked a little while to our first village tribe. During this short time i managed to gain an admirer - our guide 'Boon'. This was quite amusing at first but it soon became an annoyance (very comical for everyone else though!)

The second day we walked for half a day to the elephant camp. There we had lunch with the beasts and then mounted them for an hour and a half trek. This was rather scary and uncomfortable but definiely something i will not be forgetting! Especially because our leader guy decided to jump off and leave Tom to guide not only our elephant but the whole group of elephants as we were at the front!

The second camp was Boon's village and a good night was spent being taught Thai 'drinking' games in which the drink is water. Ask me when i hget back to teach you the chicken game! very amusing and noisy game. We then attempted to teach english drinking games to boon with not much success!

The final part of the trek was done on bamboo rafts made by the locals. This was a very fun but wet adventure. I cleverly decided to sit down on the raft to rest meaning that when we hit rapids i was up to my neck in water!

After returning form our trek we spent one more eve in Chiang Mai in which we went out for a meal, looked around the night markets an were taken to some dingy stoners house before quickly leaving and going to some beach bar place which turned out to be pretty cool. It was here we managed to get Boon to finally shut up when he was so intoxicated to do anything!

After travelling back on the train we said goodbye to the rest of the group, spent a very long hot day in bangkok mainly on Koh San Road, and caught and overnight bus to the islands. Little did we know what awaited us .....