To all you fab and wonderful people out there, Firstly wishing you all a Happy New Year. My first piece of advice for the year being forget all that making a resolution for the year as it usually ends in failure, like the classic "must lose a stone" or "must make an effort to have more than one shower a week" (yes that one goes out to my dear darling brother who has not yet established the concept of soap or hygiene!). Live each day as it comes. Dont set yourself goals or objectives for months to come, just plan to luive each to day to the best of your ability and know that whatever happens everything will go well for you and it shall. Anyway thats enough of that for now................ Im sure most of you have been living it up the past few days and made the most of the fact that at this time of year it is totally justifiable to poison yourself, show your ass to a crowd of 3,000 people and get called a hero and then pass out in a gutter awoken the next morning with a stray dog licking your face. No my new year was not like this, but i shall come onto that in a second. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind to say the least and im lost as to where to start with all my news. I shall try to summarise.......... My last week in India was beautiful. I spent it on my own in a a very holy town called Hampi where i spent days walking in the hills, writing and rockclimbing. I met some fantastic people there and i was even lucky enough to be there for the celebration of a festival for the Shivas Marriage (Hindu Godess). During the procession i was fortunate enough to get kissed by an elephant which is supposed to be ggod luck and bring you luck with money (those of you who know me will know i need it). We then trekked along to the temple where the whole place was sparkling in candlelight). There i joined in the prayers and watched the locals singing and dancing together. After my week in Hampi, I headed back up north to Goa where i had to meet Logs to get our flight out of Goa and onto Bangkok. For those of you who do not know, yes I am now in Thailand. Having heard so many great things about it from other travellers, we decided to come and visit. Logs and I landed in Bangkok on the 20th of December and stayed in the Khao San for 3 days. It was absolutely mental! I has to battle with the urge yet again to not blow my whole travelling budget in a day, after all this is the land of fake labels, but the thai jewellery and clothing is also stunning. We took a trip to the famous Panteep Plaza to find me an underwater housing for my camera so i can use it when diving. All i can say is OH MY GOD.......... I have no interest in electronics or funky little gadgets with a million buttons but this place is amazing. It is every mans dream come true. It is five floors of everything from the most amazing range of MP3 players to hard drives for computers to the most stunning digital cameras and video cameras and all the accessories at the most stupid prices. I found a 4gb memory card for my camera which cost the same as my 1gb memory card that i bought back home! Thank god i left the credit card at the hotel. That evening loggers and i toasted our last night in bangkok with a savoury feast of fried crickets, silk worms, worms and Locusts oh and a cockroach to wash it down. They were really yummy, the only point at which i got the gag reflex was when i got the cricket leg stuck in my throat and i started to choke on it. That was a bit gross. 12 hours later, logs and i were on the boat over to Koh Phangan, which is where we are still to be found. We have been here for xmas and new year now. Xmas eve was a messy affair thanks to the quantities of alcohol that they serve in thai bars. Out here you buy a drink by the bucket so come 2am Logs and i were passed out in the surf, trying to establish which direction was homewards and how to make our limbs work agagin. Amazingly we did it and lived to celebrater new year with a bang! We hit sunrise beach for the biggest party i have ever been too. We hooked up with some mates from our dive club and found a couple of tables, necked a few buckets of rum and red bull and danced till the sun rose. Deciding that i no longer wanted people to be able to see what i looked like in the sunlight, Logs and i retired back to our bungalow and slept till 6 in the evening. We have had a fab time here in Koh Phangan! We went out on a hike the other day whiuch we were told would take 1.5 hrs through the jungle to a secluded beach. So of we went......... 3hrs later we scrambled out the jungle with cuts and bruises. There was no path to speak of, for the most part logs and i were rockclimbing the bloody trail and i aquired 147 mosquitoe bites. Dont worry gran, i went to the doctors just to be safe and she gave me pills. She said if i got a fever within 24hrs then i was likely to have the Dengue fever but its now 5 days ago and i am fine except i look a little like elephant woman. Funnily anough though our mate got one mossie bite the other day and he has been suffering the dengue fever for a week now. Oh and just to reassure you gran i cant get malaria as there is none. We shall now be here in Koh Phangan for another month as logs and i have found a little project to keep us busy. We are training up in our diving qualifications at the mo. I am working on my divemaster so i can start doing guided dives with a view to getting some work in Indonesia. I have also since thought about spending out a little more and doing my assistant instructor so i can earn that bit more. We are out on the dive boat everyday to our dive site in the Angthong Marine Park where we are enjoying checking out the vast array of soft corals and other marine life. We have also taken on the role of doing some dive briefings onboard the boat just giving people some general info on what we will be seeing and how to behave underwater. It is Logs and my way of saying to people dont touch the bloody coral as its older than you and your fat little fingers will kill it. Through doing thjis i have managed to wangle a few free speciality courses such as nitrox (enriched air diver), peak performance buoyancy etc. After this logs and i will probably head south with some mates who are also working here. Mark who is a divemaster with the dive club and his wife annalee and her friend Stella. They too are also heading on a similar route to us. Other than this there is not much else to report. Life is great, we are loving where we are and what we are doing now and there are so many fab opportunities coming up which could mean some good short term work to top up the travellling fund. Do check out the website as Logs and I are up loading photos of the past few days. I should go for now guys but your postcards are on the way and i am sorry the contact has been bad recently but to use internet here costs more than at home and with the slow speed it is really expensive. Missing you all and so looking forward to seeing you all when i get home, Lots of Love Nadia xxxxxxxxxxxxxx