Hi everyone! Hope you're all well.

Thanks for all of your emails and blog messages and text messages (and Jo and Molly, thanks for the lovely voicemail!). We are in New Zealand at the moment, in Auckland. We arrived on Sunday (27th) and are picking up our campervan today. I'm just telling you this as I think we may have confused everyone with where we are at the moment seeing as though we're so behind with our blog updates. We have already spent our 6 weeks in Australia - updates to follow shortly... promise!. Anyway, back to the blog in hand, Ko Lanta and then back to Ko Phi Phi....

We deliberated for a while over whether or not to move on from Ko Phi Phi as we liked it so much, but in the end we decided that we should make the effort - after all, we might like the next island even more?! So, we packed up our backpacks... again... and caught the early morning ferry across to the next island south, Ko Lanta Yai. We had already booked ourselves into a nice hotel, which was costing us double what we were paying on Ko Phi Phi, but we struggled to find any real backpacker accomodation (unless we wanted to stay in a bamboo hut on the beach, which may seem romantic to the less pathetic amongst you but to us it just screamed out "spider-hell") and convinced ourselves that we deserved a treat. And although the hotel didn't disappoint - it was no 5-star establishment but it was lovely - I think we have gotten so used to staying in small, locally run hostels and guesthouses that we actually didn't feel that comfortable. It felt like we'd stepped right off the flash-packer scale and into a whole new realm of the European-family-away-for-two-weeks-on-a-package-holiday-who-plan-to-spend-the-whole-time-in-the-resort. And talk about craic-less! There was none at all!

The weather wasn't so good on the afternoon we arrived so we pretty much just chilled out and bemoaned the fact that we weren't still on Phi Phi. The evening turned out to be lovely though as when we walked along the beach (there is no town or centre to speak of) we were very pleasantly surprised to find a number of drinking establishments. And they were so idyllic! Just little bar huts right on the beach with chairs and cushions and loungers strategically placed in the sand... what more could you ask for?! So we sat and watched the sun going down, getting steadily more merry and deciding, as is often the case, that eating is cheating so let's just get another beer instead! The walk back to the hotel along the shore definitely beat the typical end-of-the-night English backdrop of kebab shops, too! The next day didn't offer up anything new - just a repeat of the day/night before (which was hardly a hardship, I have to be honest) - and then the next morning we hot-footed it back to Phi Phi as although it was lovely and quiet and extremely chilled out, we wanted to be back in the action with all the young coolies (and Liverpool were playing Man Utd that night so we needed a bar with a sports-showing tv!).

Back on Phi Phi we checked into the same guesthouse we had stayed in a couple of days before and had a BIG night watching the football (no need to mention the result) before heading to the local nightclub to take advantage of the free "buckets" and watch some very overweight and drunk white chaps trying their hand at Thai boxing. We could have been in Tenerife!

So, after our final two nights in Thailand we got the ferry back to Phuket and had a real treat... we met the lovely Whisper for lunch before catching our flight to Melbourne. It was really good to see someone from home - hope you enjoyed the rest of your trip, Whisper!

xxx