Fasten your Seatbelts and if you thought Malyasia was good, a big Welcome and Hello from Uber Sunny, Sandy and Templey Thailand! (p.s sorry to hear about the cold snap back home by the way!)

This blogs highlights include a fair few big transport hops. We left friendly (and cheep for shopping) Malaysia 8 days ago, on a daytime bus, only 12 hours ish, arriving in the port of Surratthani before catching a somewhat crampt night ferry (9 hours) to Kao Tao. Cat seemed to really enjoy the boat ride, for once she wasn't sea sick - even thought the boat was small and bouncing with 3 meters high waves. (the tail end of moonsoon season Oops!) Everyone slept along the length of the boat with your head at the port side and the feet touching the starboard, with about 40-50cm matresses space before the next person. This combined with the earlier minibus journey made it one of the hellish variety in my oppion, exept for cat who loved it all, describing it as a 'romantic experence'!

Now as you might have noticed Cat and I have seen a far few islands, hunting for the perfect beach. In fact we've seen a blummin lot of them, although at first glance you might not be able to notice from my dissapointly pale skin! (unlike cats) But I'm chuffed to tell you that Kao Tao, unlike many attempts in Zanzibar, Oz and Fiji ticked the boxes. Unbeliveably clear blue-green water -The climate was cooler which cat informs me is perfect for sun bathing, the beaches were sandy and the accomodation and bars cheeper than other countries too. And apparently a divers paradise. We spent 3 days doing what you do on a beach with nothing much to do. (let me know if you know?) side note for the divers, the diving is apparnetly amazing in this part of the world, but the one dive i did had only 1-5 meters visability, due to the choppy seas. So it would be unfair of me to judge, but it wasn't worth investing in more dive when i was there!

We braved the choppy waters and transferred to another tropical island off Thailands east coast, Koa Pan Ngan and cat was back on form spending most of the day wiped out from the effect of the sea and the anti sickness tablets, which she now blames for her bouts of motion sleepness/drousey ness. luckly we found a nice beach on the remote north eastern corner of the island where she could recover! spending 2 nights at another great place, which was kitted out for hundreds of travellers but only seemed to have about 30. This could be the first signs of the much talked about world economic slow down. So we talked about that for a while and then moved south on the Island to a place called Hat Rin. Which is famous for its partying and OMG the place is set up for it. Although due to the time we had to spend sorting out our Visa problems (back in Malysia,) it was impossible to make it for the full moon (10th Jan) or say late enough for the next (10th of Feb) so we made do with some half moon action instead!

Drinking from a bucket until your queezy, which as we all know in cat's case dosen't take long. I'll leave the rest up to your imagination (Grandma Crosby i hope that paints a good enough picture for you?)

So quickly moving on... (along the transport theme) we then took an hour taxi to a boat off the island taking 4 hours to get back to the main land, followed up by a 12 hour overnight (code for no sleep) bus to Bangkok! Where we only saw a taxi and a Train station, but luckly then spent another 14 hours on a train time to catch up on sleep, before arriving in Chiang Mai at 10pm, just in time for a 10 min tuk tuk ride and you guessed it some more sleep. (for the geography geeks that was a change of 16 degrees latitude all in one journey!)

Chiang Mai is in the mountainious far north, which has a much colder (almost Uk like climate apparently) so today as we explored we put our jumpers and trouers on. only to be greeted with amazing sights and temples + too much shopping action and 25 degree heat. a truly amazing place and not a bad point to take some refuge in an air conditioned internet cafe!

I'm sure this place will feature heavily in Cat's (much longer) post along with stories of a 3 day Treck with hill tribes, elephants, rafting and a cookery course! but that will have to wait until after our proper vist to Bangkok in a few days.

I hope you all read this well and see you soon (maybe in feb)

Much love and hugs