I appear to have lost Thailand. I can't find it anywhere. I tried looking in my sock drawyer but all I found was Chris' sanity.

I know that will probably make no sense to most of you but it seemed an appropriate place to start the first blog for Thailand for reasons I may get back to later. I suppose an even more appropriate place to have started would've been to pick up the story from where I left off - that is being stranded in Nepal...

It turned out we didn't have to wait long for one of our reservations to come through. We were called at 5.30 and given half an hour to get to the office and stump up the money in cash so we could fly the next day. An hour or so later we had two tickets to Bangkok and coonnecting flights to Phuket (of course after the initial panic of trying to find an ATM that actually worked!). So there we are with two tickets and one evening to pack so we decide to go and meet some friends for a quick drink. Several hours later we find ourselves in a club (apparantly run by the mafia but that's a story for another time) and heading back to one of their houses (who lived in Kathmandu). Now at around 7am we wake and realise that we need to catch a flight at 1pm and had little idea of where we were. Slight problem. The rest is history though and we made it to Thailand in one piece.

So Phuket. Well. Think large Mediteranean resort complete with large strips of bars lining the streets and beach front. Instead of the touts, however, ploying you with bogof drinks the bars were adorned with Thai girls to attract the male clientele. We managed to find a not-so-seedy place on a side street run by a Swedish guy which we frequented frequently and played various bar games. Real entertainment in this place was, in one view, fairly sparse but then to our sense of humour we found hours of amusement in the shear number of fat, old, blading farang (white folk) strutting the streets with their 20-something Thai brides. And of course there were the ladyboys. Lots of them.

So now I come back to my opening statement and it may now be obvious that what I was trying to say is that Thailand (the South at least) has been completely Westernised obliterating any trace of traditional Thai-life. Tourism is big business especially now package holidays are firmly established and so the money pours in. This does not look like a poor country down here at all. It's some 3 or 4 times the price of Nepal and the only thing that is cheap, in keeping with the 'club-med' feel is the alcohol. You can buy buckets of the stuff and that's no exageration. I have been told that it's still possible to see the real Thailand right at the North but having so little time I will be ognorantly happy to beleive the rumours. I hope they are true.

After the manic nights in Phuket we moved on to Ao Phan-Nagn. Here we tried to rent a couple of kyaks to explore the mangroves and surrounding karst islands and caves. Unfortunately, still in package tour territory, no-one would let us do this so we had to settle for joing a long tail boat tour, which the driver refused to let me drive (suprisingly enough). The tour took in local islands including one that was used in the filming of 'The Man With the Golden Gun' now affectionately known as 'James Bond Island'. It was nice.

So now in the Islands in the Gulf of Thailand - another blog to come soon...