Hello everyone!

We're back in Bangkok now but not for long which is good because it's roasting here! It's 10am now and already 36 degrees and absolutely no breeze. We took a night bus from Vientiane in Laos over the boarder and back in to Thailand. This bus was much better than the bus we took in Laos and had reclining leather seats. Immigration was pretty easy, the bus drops you off and you get your passport stamped and then get back on to the bus again. Simple! We were also treated to a movie on the bus in ENGLISH which was great - only a rubbish Wesley Snipes action one but it passed the time. We both managed to sleep and nobody was snoring so all in all it was a good trip. We got in to Bangkok at 5.45am and went straight to our guesthouse.

We took the executive decision not to go back to sleep and forced ourselves to get out and do something, We managed to book a bus for the following night (tonight) to our next destination, Chumphon and from there we will get a ferry over to Koh Tao. We are all booked to start our 4 day Open Water diving course on the 29th. We're not sure where we will go from there, we may stay on the island depending on how cheap it is. Apparently a lot of the islands are quite expensive the further south you go so we'll have to shop around and hopefully find a bargain.

Back to yesterday - we were so desperate to replace our camera lead so that we can uploda photos and also charge the bloody thing so we had to go to a shopping mall (that's all we seem to do when we come to Bangkok, but at least its air conditioned!) and walk around looking for one. Because our camera is awkward (apparently Samsung only just started to make them!) every shop and stall had USB leads for every other make except ours! No one seems to sell Samsung cameras! We were starting to get desperate (and very bored) after walking around what felt like a million places and then we finally found it. The guy that sold us to it must have thought that we were crazy - we were both so grateful (and probably paid well over what we should have for it) and I am ashamed to say that I actually cried after we had bought it. Funny how these things really affect you when you are travelling! It has been the most stressful thing that we have had to deal with lately and I guess the stress of losing our things just got to me. Matt took me for an early lunch to distract me from my emotional outburst - Thai noodle buffet which was nice and worked! We spent the rest of the afternoon at the cinema watching a Nicolas Cage film (it's called Knowing and we really enjoyed it) and then headed back to our guesthouse. As we mentioned before, it is SO hot and humid here and we both had headaches just from walking down the road for 20 minutes. Unfortunately our room was only a fan room and all the fan seemed to be doing was pushing the hot air around. My headache turned in to one of my full blown migranes so the evening wasn't particularly enjoyable! In the end, Matt had to move us and all our luggage to an air con room (double the [rice) because it was just unbearable in the other room. Luckily I woke up this morning and it had gone - it wouldn't have been fun travelling on an overnight bus with a migrane!

Now we have checked out of our lovely cool room and have decided to just hang around today and wait for our bus. We will leave for the station at 5pm - even though the bus leaves at 7pm it will probably take at least an hour to get there in Bangkok traffic (which moves at a snails pace at all times of day!) and we managed to buy some sleeping tablets so hopefully that will knock us out for the journey.

When we next write we will be on Koh Tao with lots of exciting news about our diving course so until then, lots of love Holls & Matt xxx