Sawadi-Kat!

Hello and welcome to the next update!

As you may have guessed, we are now in Bangkok and have checked in to a beautiful hotel to recouperate from the wonderful (but sometmes basic and stinky) tour through Vietnam, Laos and Thailand!

It was an amazing adventure, and despite having a few extra little 'friends' crawling up the walls and greeting us in the bathroom in the mornings, overland travel is definitely the way to go to get the REAL flavour of a place.

We have travelled by bus, boat, tuk-tuk, elephant and on foot over the last few weeks and have seen the most beautiful scenery and met some really cool people but one of the highlights was defintely the elephant tour. Climbing onto the elephant with our bare feet, onto its head, feeling the warm but very wrinkly skin, really did freak me out at first - but the elephants were so cool!!! We also had the chance to feed them afterwards and learn about how they were kept in captivity, as they were all rescue animals. Our poor elephant had been blinded in one eye with a machete because he could not pull the logs!

Chang Mai was also a pretty cool place, and we spent the afternoon on bikes, riding around the town. We then boarded the overnight train to Bangkok which Lynz really was not looking forward to after hearing all the horror stories, but it actually turned out ok! The little man who came along to turn the seats into beds was genius, and an unknown world record holder we're sure!

Arriving in Bangkok was not as much of a culture shock as we were expecting (but I think Hanoi ticked all the boxes on that one) but the heat is pretty formidable. We are sweating through glands we never knew we had out here. We enjoyed one last evening with the whole group to say goodbye and went out afterwards on the Khao San road. We also tried to be a little cultural and visited the Grand Palace and enrolled on the Mai Kadee cooking school. At first we were a bit sceptical as it was advertised as vegetarian cooking, but we thought we'd at least get the basics of Thai food, and could add meat when back home - oh no, the food has almost turned me veggie - it was delicious!!!

Today we are having a well-earned chill-out day before flying to Cambodia tomorrow to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat and from what we have heard, it is supposed to be spectacular so we really looking forward to it! And then we fly back to Thailand to an island for some proper R+R and maybe a bit of diving. Who knows?!

Hope all is well with everyone back home and we STILL are loving all the blogs so do keep them coming and tell us of your news! Only 3 more weeks and 4 countries to go....

See you all soon!!!

L and G xxx