Chiang Mai is cool. The city centre has a huge moat around it keeping the hippies and backpackers circled in around a feast of restaurants and cheap hotels, we found a large on-suite room with cable tv, air-con and a fridge/freezer for a backpackers price. I signed up for a day cookery course to learn the difficult art of Thai fairy cake decorating. Those wings can be so tricky. (joking) I picked the Baan Thai cookery school, because the menu was extensiv...

We get into Bangkok in the early hours of the morning and the first thing I notice is the audible change. Seven years ago the traffic communicated with each other using their horns. The more beeps of the horn signified the greater the potential danger of a collision. First time out of Europe, it was 2001, and I left Bangkok airport in a taxi to the centre. The noise of the car horns was my first memory and experience, a massive cacophony of beeping from everyone...

We didn't expect to get a job offer back on Ko Phangan, however the project and the contract were favorable, and the deal clincher was the welcome news the building site served Earl Grey tea! Back on Ko Phangan we checked into the Blue sea bungalow and after a couple of hours, Harry and his wife Leam pulled up with a yute load of Thai decorations they had been buying in Chiang Mai. The four of us drove over to Harry and Leams Thai mansion currently being built...

The beautiful island of Ko Tao is our next stop, the diving and snorkelling centre of Thailand. The first thing we did was to sign up for a dive, going to a site called Champon pinnacle. Kat and I were dive buddies and we were taken out by James the American dive master. The four pinnacles were covered in anemones and small corals. We saw loads of cool fish including bat fish, big groupers, clown fish, barracuda, angel fish and way too many other divers. The pop...

Our first stop in Thailand is the island that has become a rite of passage for almost every English person to visit, Ko Phangan. We take a really expensive taxi (thanks to the taxi mafia on the island) up to the North and checked in to a place on Haad Khom beach. On the beach we drank a lot, ate a lot, swam a lot and read a lot of books. It was great. The only interesting thing worth mentioning was a very funny conversation I had one with an English guy while ...