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 HAPPY NEW YEAR!- A quick insight from loggers Well, the update so far! For thoses who dont know i am currently living the life in Thailand... It rocks! We are staying in a place called koh phangan which you may of heard of from those crazy full moon parties everyone talks about. Well it looks like me and nadia will be staying here for a month as we have made a little family out here... a family of divers. We are both currently doing our resue diver and i'm doing my advanced and nads is doing here dive master ( i'll do my dive master in indo). When i finish that course i'll be helping out on the boat ( which we pretty much do anyway) but i'll be able to get some free dives in. I have to say i have been overhelmed with the amount of sealife here when i came up from my first dive i cried as i was i couldnt belive what i was seeing especially as i have learnt so much thoughout my courses at uni it all seems to come into place. So the plan is for us both to get to dive master which means we can take experienced divers out and we can get paid for doing this therfore we will be working were ever we are now... AAARRRRHH YEAH - doing it on the cheap! As far as new years went! it was absolutly mental thousands of people started arriving a few days before and on the night it was crammed with people. We headed down the sunrise beach where it all happens got about 4 buckets in ( They drink rum and coke with this werid red bull stuff and fill the bucket up to the top and drink- lets just say it = severe hangovers). We were up on the beach till around 9 in the moriing people passed out on the beach everywhere it was mental and it definatly is up there wih one of the best new years i have experienced. I thought i wouldnt make it through the night as the morning of new years eve we all went out diving from 7 in the morning- I know seriuos stuff! But as soon as that rum and red bull kicked in i was away, dancing on tables speaking to sooo many randoms... I met a guy from Bendigo which was pretty nuts as well! The the last week we have been here we have been doing some pretty mental stuff as there is quite alot to do on this island. The other day nids and I decided to do a walk.. this walk we thought would be a nice easy family walk as it had talked about it in this guide we picked up. Well we started this walk .. us both in flip flops and me in a skirt wasn't the best idea we had for starters! The walk started off witha slteep slipperly climb through the jungle! there were sooo many mozzies and all we had to guard them off was tiger balm which dripped off our face with the amount of sweat dripping from us! When we stopped mossies came from no where and i smacked i few on my legs as i did blood came flying out everywhere and it looked like i had cut all my leg up. So we carried on walking finding the route was a task in its self and we soon got lost. We had seen all of these bottles hanging up or on the floor and we were both like- litter is bad here luckily enough we didnt pick them up as we finally worked out some of them were showing the route! We saw some amazing viewsa and worked out he had climbed pretty hihg it was great. when we got to the end there was no path or anything but we did see a dog- he looked like he knew where he was going so craziely followed him and to our suprise he did show us the right way!mental so if you do come here and decided to do the green dot trail where there arnt any green dots to follow..follow the dog pass the tree with no leaves then pass the tree with leaves then turn right and you are there!( Stian- thats for you and your eggs no eggs joke!) Well anyway guys as you all SHOULD know its my bday coming up ( 23rd of Jan!) And it looks like i'll be either doing a masssive canoe trip with all our mates here or as i have the dive instructor round my little finger now! I can take the dive boat out on a two day trip arrh yeah so will let you guys know how that all pans out. Anyway hope you all had an amazing christmas and new year. Have just got over my Hangover hope you guys all have. Lots of Love Loggers