Hi all,

We're now in Ko Tao and whilst Katie is doing her Open Water Diving course I thought i'd use the time to update the old Blog.

Just after I updated the blog last time there was a fair bit of rain in Ko Samui which mean't the electricity kept shorting out. It kept coming on and turning off in our hotel room all night and at around three in the morning it came back on which woke us up. I then heard a massive scream from Katie as she ran across the room saying that something had crawled across her arm whilst she was asleep.

Tryin to be helpful and manly I pulled back the covers to remove whatever it was and saw this huge Millipede. I may be overexaggertaing a little but this thing must have been about three feet long and was crawling around all snakelike. Hateful creature. From those of you who know about the mouse incident in Tooting, will know that I am not the bravest of people when it comes to this sort of thing, but I grabbed it in a bag and threw it out of the door.... about ten seconds later there was a knock at the door... now it may have been that I was tired but I half thought it was the millipede. The thing then crawled back under our door and the security guard from outside came into the room, openly laughing at us and stamped on it.. why hadn't i though of that? Anyway I digress.

Last Friday we travelled from Samui to Ko Phangan to give us a bit of time in Phangan before the full moon party on the Sunday. Apparently everyone else had the same idea as the place was totally rammed with people.

We looked around Haadrin for a cheapo place to stay for about an hour, and the recurring theme was that most of the places were either full or double their price around the Full Moon party as demand is so high. We eventually found a place to meet our budget, which was lucky as I am not the most patient person in the world and was ready to give up.

Our digs weren't actually that bad, although the bathroom was pretty shoddy and wouldn't have looked out of place in Alcatraz. Oh well you can't have it all!

The first night we were there, Katie agreed that we could go and see the Muay Thai fight in the local stadium (a shed). For those of you who haven't been here, there are pick up trucks going down the street almost every half hour with a load speaker advertsing something like this ' Tonight, tonight, TONIGHT. Muay Thai, Muay Thai, MUAY THAI. Fight of your life ..... etc' so we jumped on the back and went to have a look what was going on.

It was about three pounds to get in to the outer circle which was pretty much next to the ring anyways. As we walked in we saw the first bought of the evening which was two ten year olds laying in to eachother... thought we might have turned up at the wrong place but after that they got the actual fighters on. Was high standard and what made the whole evening that bit better was that the announcer sounded like Brick Top from Snatch and the majority of his tips before the fight e.g. 'Watch out for this fighter, he has explosive power' were wrong. I thinking he was blagging it.

The Full Moon party itself has got to be seen to be believed. We turned up on the beach just before midnight and the whole length of beach is full up with people raving it up covered in day glo paint. We sat in one of the bars on the front for a warm up beer before heading in to the midst of it all and joining in.

Sad to say but we didn't last the distance as some did. We headed back to the room at around three o'clock as Katie had become a little too fond of the Mojito bucket (she had three) and was in need of a bit of a lie down. Was a good night though and I understand why people flock here every month.

We stayed in Phangan for an extra day to recover and then headed to Ko Tao to do our diving.

As I did my Open Water diving course before I only had to do a two hour refresher course in the pool and now I have been ticked off to carry on diving. I'm going on a dive tomorrow and have been told that its 70% likely that we will see a shark and there have already been a few sightings of a whale shark so could get to see one of those too if we are lucky.

Katie is in the pool now on her second day of the four day diving course and when she's done we are going to do a 30m dive in Chumpon which looks awesome!

I will upload all the photos another time as the woman in here doesn't trust me to use the USB slot on the computer... I think the beard is making me look shifty.