Our first week of teaching went very well and we are both enjoying the experience. We have a range of different age groups from 4-13. We are teaching for a few hours a day and then have extra time to prepare for our lessons. This week we were asked to concentrate on numbers and next week we will be teaching directions with the older classes. The children are very welcoming and seem to enjoy our lessons, especially the 4/5 year olds as we playing head, shoulde...

Teaching was cancelled today as it is a public holiday here in Thailand today and tomorrow, so instead we went for an elephant trek and bamboo rafting. First we went on a boat trip down the river and visited temples that had once been sunken. They certainly weren't as ornate as the previous temples we've seen and that was due to the water wadhing off the brightly coloured paint. After that we travelled to the elephant camp. We sat on the head of elephants as all...

We arrived in the small town of Sangkhlaburi near the Burma boarder yesterday afternoon. This is our base for volunteering. The town is very small but has everything we need including an internet cafe!!!! We have wandered around the market and ate in a few of the local restaurants...so cheap to eat here only 50p for a meal! Dan was suppose to be doing some buliding work for volunteering but there isn't anything to do at the moment, so he'll be teaching aswell. ...

Today we had a bit of relaxing day. In the late morning we had cooking lessons with one of our guides, Tanya. It was great fun learning to cook Pad Thai (a local noodle dish) and tofu with cashew nuts. It was very yummy but it was uncomfortable as it was around 35c and we were cooking outside. In the afternoon we lazed around the pool and sunbathed. For dinner we went with the group into town and went for a meal in a restaurant made out of bamboo!

I have now fulfilled a life long dream and have gotten up close and personal with tigers at Tiger Temple. It has been the highlight of the trip so far and an expereince I'll never forget! Dan didn't come, so I went with some of the group. The sanctuary is overseen by monks who take cubs in when their mothers have been killed by poachers and bring them up as pets, thus you can touch and stroke them in the same way you would a domestic cat. I paid a little extra ...