We had our early night (2am) in preparation for the arrival of Emily + Rosie and successfully met them on the pier in the morning! We all took a taxi boat to the part of the beach that is right next to our accomodation. Our room is literally in the best location ever; its right above diza bar so we get some really good music playing below us, its opposite the seven eleven (small 24hr grocery store) a minutes walk from a lush beach and a couple minutes from the best bar on the island, Lotus bar! Oh and at night Mr Speed, the speediest pancake man the speediest pancake man on the island, settles himself right next to us! We must of gone to Lotus bar every night we were on Koh Toa! The first night Em + Ro arrived we decided to head there, the fire show is on every night and every time you go it is equally as impressive as the last. We grabbed some buckets of drink and had the biggest catch up ever whilst we all filled eachother in on all the gossip that we'd missed! It was really night as Lotus has these seat cushion things that are just on the sand and everyone lounges around. Later in the evening we got chatting to a group of people, two of them guys, Freddie & Will are from Bridport and we have ended up often bumping into them ever since so have become good friends.

The next night we decided to check out the highly reccomoneded Lady Boy Cabaret show, although Im not sure if we'd reccomend it to anyone else! It was so freaky, they just looked so much like actual women! Freakiness aside it was an experience and of course very funny! After the Lady Boy Show we headed back to Lotus bar - standard! The flame throwers had caught on to the fact we were regulars and thought it would be okay to come upto Vicky and spin the fire around on her head or even around her whole body! Once the fire finishes we'd head to the dance floor of maybe 2 by 4 metres? if that! Although very small it was really good fun, everyone would cram on and dance until the early hours, if we got too hot and sweaty we'd simply go for a late night swim in the sea to cool down! A usual night would then involve going to watch Mr Speed make pancakes for an hour or so. He's so incredibly fast you really can you stand and stare, people make videos of him and apparently there are fan groups on facebook for him!

In the day time we often slept in late and then chilled on the beach. Technically this is a cultural/travelling experience (not just being lazy) as this is the general way of life on the islands. The first few days we went to the beach but it was so hot we all got a little burnt. One day we woke up to a massive monsoon shower which was wierd, for a couple hours the island was totally flooded but not long later the sun cleared it all up.

After a couple of days on Koh Toa with Emily + Rosie we all set off for Koh Phanagan, the island where the full moon party is. Before we left everyone had warned us that it gets really busy just before the party and we wouldnt be able to find accomodation and it would all be really expensive etc... but we decided just to turn up and see what happend. It was only a 3 hour ferry ride to Phanagan but as everyone seemed to be going there too it was ridiculously crammed and therfore not the most enjoyable journey (especially after having little sleep the previous night). Once we arrived on Phanagan we bumped into Will + Freddie and shared a taxi with them to Haadrin where the full moon party is. The taxi ride was mental, it may as well of been a roller coster, there were about 12 of us crammed sat in the back of this pick up truck clutching on for dear life but thankfully we all arrived unharmmed. We had been warned that Headrin wasnt a very nice place to stay because of the full moon party and that it was really touristy and trashy. We decided to stay there anyway becuase it was so close and convenient for the party and to be honest we really didnt find it that bad. At first was quite different, for example in Koh Toa we never wore shoes, eveyone just walks around barefoot, but in Haadrin its a bit grubby so we made sure we kept them on. We stayed in a place called Anan bungalows which was okay considering we were paying 150b each a night (3 pounds) however there was an infestation of ants and the walls were pretty much all made of mirrors which was a bit odd. The best thing about it thoguh was that it was literally on the beach so we didnt have tro go anywhere to get to the party! We had a day or so to spre before the party started and luckily we bumped into Emily, a friend we made in India, who was staying at the CoCo Hut resort just up the road. CoCo huts is amazing. Its got a spa, a pool, jacuzzi... everything! Each day we would go and sneak in there, chill on the private beach there whcih was beautiful and then use the hot power showers! Cheeky yet necasasry, at Anan our shower consisted of a dribble of cold water!

After a day relaxing at Coco Huts, we got ready for the full moon party by coating ourselves in flourescent paint and full moon merchandise (ellie bought some very sexy man's swim shorts). We met up with Freddie and Will at their luxury bungalow for some pre drinks before setting off for the beach to join the party and the 30000 other people! Our favourite bit of the party was the drum and bass area. Vicky managed to score herself a free bucket of drink after recieving love notes from one of the bar tenders who thought she had "cute name cute face". We basically spent the whole night dancing, emily and rosie went to bed at half 5, whereas we (the hardcore ones) stayed up to watch the sunrise. We stayed on the beach chilling until we decided we might be getting sunburnt and went for some breakfast. I think we got about an hour's sleep before going to Coco Huts to chill for the day. The next day we decided to have an early night and only stayed out til 6am! We had a really good night at the cactus bar getting more free drinks from Vicky's friend and taking part in the fire limbo. Emily and Rosie didnt have such a good night, they went back to the room early and had a strange encounter with an intruder into our room. Aparantly they had to press themselves up against the door to stop him entering and even considered escaping through the window! The next day we left Koh Phangan, instead of going to Koh Phi Phi as planned we headed back to Koh Tao-time and money was of the essence and we were missing the Lotus bar.

We treated ourselves to a night in the luxurious seashell resort (jacuzzi and spa) and ended up staying there the rest of our time on the island. Although to afford this luxury we did have to squeeze the four of us in one bed! Quite hot with no aircon but we could always cool down in the pool. Freddie and Will had also come back to Koh Tao, we had some really good nights out with them at Lotus bar etc. We also met up with Jonas,a cool guy from Amsterdam, who we had met on Koh Phangan.

After a few days chilling on the island all of us headed back to Bangkok, and of course checked into our fave Nat's Guesthouse. We were excited to be back, however emily and rosie were not keen on the ants in the shower (emily did get some in her pants to be fair). After spendinga lot of time relaxing on the beach, we decided it was time to make the most of Bangkok and hopped in a tuk tuk. The man offered us 5 baht to go everywhere around the city, we knew it was too good to be true but got in anyway and weren't surprised when we got abandoned at the first stop! We found another tuk tuk, who offered us a reduced price if we went into some shops for him so he could get free petrol from the shop manager. Dubiously we went along with it and ended up at Thailand's "best tailors", unfortunatley we had already been there with another tuk tuk driver and somehow recognised us. They gave us an extremely overfriendly welcome, we didn't stay too long after they enquired how to undo our bikinis and offered to take us to heaven. Eventually we did manage to get to the Grand Palace only to find it was closed, classic! Luckily we managed to find a tuk tuk driver who would take us back to Kaosan Road, the driver quite possibly broke the speed limit as we darted through the riots but it was good to get a glimpse of what was going on! We still wanted to do something really cultural with our day so decided after the stress of all the tuk tuk drivers we'd have to go for a thai massage. Its quite a different style of massage which involved us all led down next to eachother with thai women standing on our bum cheeks! It was painful at times but really cheap and its supposed to feel really good the next morning when you wake up, however as Vicky didnt even go to bed that night she didnt quite feel the effect! She had a really good night at the street bars chatting awayto the different friends we made whereas unfortunaterly poor elle spent the night in Nats feeling really ill. Luckily the next day she felt better as we headed to the MBK which is Bangkok's best shopping centre, Freddie, Will and Jonas came too which stopped us doing to much shopping and spending too much money but we had a real good time looking around at all the different stuff. Sadly we then had to say goodbye to Will as he had a flight home to catch but we've all promised to meet up again when we get home. Jonas suggested the rest of us go to a nice park he had heard of, it was quite a walk but was really nice to see more of the city and the park itself was perfect. We sat chilling by a lake for ages and saw these massive freaky lizard snakey things coming out of the water, were not sure what they were but hoping they werent too dangerous as Emily was obsessed with stalking them! We also got to experience a display of thai aerobics, in Thailand it seems it popular to have massive communal aerobic sessions in the park. That night was Rosie and Emilys last night so we were determined to have a really good night, however, this night Rosie was feeling ill so she stayed at Nats and Emily ended up going to an 24hr internet cafe! We still all had a really good night though, we went to a club called Gullivers for a dance before heading back to the street bars for genereal chatting and drinks. Its so nice just chilling and chatting with different people on the street, hence why yet again Vicky stayed up until the early hours, Ellie was also pretty hardcore this night and stayed up too.In the morning we had to say goodbye Rosie and Emily for 2 days as they were off to Australia already, we decided to catch up on some sleep and do a bit of shopping before our own last night in Thailand. Our last night was brilliant. We headed back to our fav, 'The Roof' where we got to listen to the live music for a bit before going to meet up with the guys and yet again found ourselves a nice bar to have a few drinks at(or if your ellie 2 boiled eggs). We stayed there all night, yet again chatting to all different interesting people having a really nice time! Freddie left the next morning at 7am, we waved him off and yet again had breakfast before going to bed, we figured we would just sleep on the flight!

Leaving Thailand was really sad after having such an amazing time. It was also rather difficult to leave as it turned out we had been staying there ileagally. Thailand had such a relaxing influence on us that we didn't feel it was necessary to check our visas, instead we thought it would be fine to just take a guess at when it ran out. To be fair we were only 6 days out, but this did result in a 3000 baht fine each (500 baht a day)! Admittedly this wasn't an ideal situation but we were both in agreement that our extra time in Thailand was well worth the fine. The rest of the journey went quite smoothly and before we knew it we were at Sydney airport having major culture shock after having to pay $4 for a bottle of water! At that moment Vicky just wanted to get back on the plane to Thailand and the 30baht Pad Thai! We were reunited with Rosie and Emily at Syney backpackers hostel, and also Toast! We were both catching up on much needed sleep and woke up to find her sat in our room, which was quite surreal but really good to see her! We all chatted about what we had been up to the last couple of months and then headed out for a look around sydney. We saw the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House and just had a general look around the city. Later we had our first experience of cooking for ourselves in the hostel kitchen (which did have a few nice cockroaches crawling around). The next day we took the ferry to Manly and slept on the beach all day! It was really cool taking the ferry back after sunset and seeing the Opera House lit up. That evening we got ourselves free VIP access to a club by bumping into the Owner's son in Hungry Jacks (equivalentof burgerking) and had our photo taken for the club's publicity-good times! Going out in Australia is completely different to going out in Thailand-we were back at our hostel by 2 am, vicky's body clock was very confused!

The next day we planned to wake up at 7 to catch a train to the Blue Mountains but slept until ten oops. We decided to go anyway and frantically checked out of our hostel before being charged for another night! The train up there was great, it was a double decker so we got amazing views of the mountains on the way. At the Blue Mountains we went on the steepest train ever, it was almost a vertical drop down the mountain. We got great views of the three sisters rock formation from the train, our cable car ride and our board walk around the forest. We were very hungry after this and went for a Dominoes veggie delight pizza, even though we only got a slice each!

We arrived in Byron Bay after an overnight bus journey. We booked in to do some kayaking and a day trip to Nimbin in the next few days. After further investigation we realised it would be way cheaper to book everything we want to do in advance,so we casually blew 1000 dollars on an amazing itinery working our way up the east coast. The next few weeks are going to be very action packed! We booked our trip with Peter Pans travel agency which entitled us to a gold card and therefore free meals at the cheeky monkeys restaurant and bar in Byron bay. Of course we made full use of this and went there every night. Kayakingwas so good! Although it was advertised as Kayaking with Dolphins, I dont think any of us expected to see any, but we were wrong. we saw 7 dolphins on one wave, along with sea turtles and coral! We spend quite a lot of time in the water rather than in the kayaks due to capsizing all the time, sea kayaking is quite different to doing it on a river. The last day in Byron we went on our day trip to Nimbin, a hippy town about an hour away. It was tiny but filled with cool little shops and bakeries. Our transport there was "the Hippy Bus" which was so cool. It was a double decker bus covered in brightly cloured flowers and hippyish patterns playing regge music all the way.

Next stop was Surfurs paradise, a 2 hour bus trip up the coast. It's wierd how mow a 2 hour bus trip seems like 10 minutes compared to the over night trips. Surfurs paradise was pretty cool, we had been told that it was like a mini hollywood and lots of people seemed to have a bad opinion of it, but we all really liked it. The beach was nice and the streets were lined with palm trees and flowers. We spent the day just wandering around and making use of free drinks refills in Hungry Jacks! We had another short bus journey to Brisbane in the evening but didn't get to look round as we had to leave early the next morning to go to Noosa for our Bush Camp experience. People told us we hadn't missed out on much though so we werent too bothered.

Arriving in Noosa we were picked up by the Gagaju Bush Camp van and taken to buy our supplies for the next three days. After that it was a short bus journey into the outback to our home for the next few days, we even saw some kangaroos on the way. The camp was pretty cool, there was a big camp fire with big tree trunks around it to sit on, a big outdoor kitchen dinning area and some hammocks to chill on. There wasnt much to do there to be honest but it was really nice to be away from the internet and stuff and everyone else in the camp was really nice and of course in the day times we were busy canoing up the river. The first day we canoed 16km it was good fun but at times it was ridiculously challenging. We were in a conoe with Emily and it did not go well, we were lagging behind the entire time.Although it seems obvious now no one had actually told us we had to paddle in time, it literally took us hours to paddle across this lake. When we finally got to the other side and after a trip to the pub we went back again, on the way back we thought it would be a good idea to mix the teams up and see if we got on better. Our friend Tim hopped into our boat in exchange for Emily,he told us about the whole paddling in time thing and with that we were amazing! We were at the front the whole way back and found it really easy. The next day we didnt have to canoe quite so far which was good, it was a short trip to the other side of the lake, a short hike and then we were at the beach, unfortunately it was ridiculously windy and rainy so we didnt stay long before paddling back.