It's hard to sum up our Asia experience in one post as it was so diverse, from trekking in Nepal and visiting monasteries in Bhutan to kayaking in Vietnam and climbing waterfalls in Laos we feel like we've experienced a million different places, cultures and foods. We'll miss the Thai foods like Tom Yum soup, Pad Thai and fresh coconuts but are very much looking forward to European classics like pizzas, pastas, pastries and desserts. We're looking forward to n...

Sukhothai was an interesting place to visit and a good way to fill the time between Chiang Mai and Bangkok. The town is home to an extensive area of Buddhist ruins, known as Old Sukhothai, which is about 12km from New Sukhothai, where people have settled in to live. We hired bikes to get there which seemed to boggle the minds of our hostel staff who knew the answer to two questions: "How do I get to Old Sukhothai?" and "Where is the bus stop to get to Old Sukhot...

In total we spent two nights in Chiang Mai, both times just as a means to an end. We're not sure how Chiang Mai made it so big as a tourist destination, sure you can organise all sorts of fun outings from Chiang Mai but you can organise the same things all over SE Asia in much nicer towns. The place is also jam packed with restaurants specialising in western food, so much so that we found it hard to find anywhere that specialised in Thai food which is another thi...

Pai absolutely lived up to its name as a hippy destination - the town is full of genuine hippies, wannabe tourist hippies, reggae bars, ukulele shops, "special herb" pizza stalls, tattoo parlours and hair salons specialising in dreadlocks. A lot of the cafes claim "organic" this and "vegetarian" that and it was the first town where Sonja wasn't the only western tourist shopping at the local fruit and veg markets. There were many attractions within 10/20 km of t...

Without bothering to make the trip out to the White Temple, we didn't find much to see or do in Chiang Rai as we are well and truly templed out. On our way to Chiang Rai we passed areas that had been so badly hit by the recent storms that stobie poles had been ripped from the ground making the main road unpassable. We also travelled through an a very eerie neighbourhood that was filled with low laying smoke and the ground was covered in hail stones, all the loca...