"It's the final countdown dadadadaaaDAdadadaDA...." I can't believe today is our last day in Bangkok! Six months - woooooooosh - gone. Tomorrow we'll be hopping on a plane, drinking as many free beverages as we can (is champagne free?), and stepping out onto English soil the following morning. It doesn't quite seem real...

As always we've been to loads of places since I last updated this blog so I'll do a quick catch up. We went from Hat Yai (where I last wrote) to Krabi, to the tropical island of Ko Phi Phi (one of the places worst hit by the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004), to Ko Samui (another island but off the east coast of Thailand - we travelled across the country by bus all in one day!), to Ko Phangan (another island, famous for its full moon parties), to the capital, Bangkok, then over the border to Siem Reap in Cambodia (where we had to go to extend our Thai visas - they only give you 14 days when you arrive into the country by land), back to Bangkok, up to Chiang Mai in the north-west of Thailand, back down to Bangkok, to Ko Chang (our last desert island, where it rained torrentially every day we were there - apparantly it's the monsoon season or something?) and then back up to Bangkok for the fourth and final time! Four weeks is enough time to "do" Thailand in, but you do have to pack it in if you want to see everything.

Probably my favourite place in Thailand was Ko Phi Phi, surprisingly closely followed by Bangkok! I expected to hate this city, for it to be noisy, crowded and dirty, but it's not at all - not the bits we've been to anyway! The legendary Khao San Road is fantastic for browsing market stalls, eating cheap (but still good) food, and meeting people. And the road opposite, away from the chaos but not too far, is a minefield of cheap (but still good) hotels. Creatures of habit that we are, we have stayed in the same one every single time we've been here! The man on reception even recognises us now! After our week of solitary sunbathing on our little island in Malaysia, Ko Phi Phi was a bit of a shock as it was literally crawling with backpackers and locals trying to sell you stuff. Tourism finally seems to have fully recovered there now, four and a half years on from the waves that decimated much of the island on Boxing Day 2004, and it's back to being a fantastic party place. It was also the first place we found REAL CHEDDER CHEESE which, after five months without it, was amazing! Needless to say we ate there (a little coffee shop come book shop with a huge labrador and a little beagle puppy) every day... We also adopted a pregnant cat while we were there, who we named Forest (on account of the forest-dwellers living on her) and who Kirsty constantly feared was going to give birth on her bed! (She didn't). We wanted to take her with us when we left but didn't think she'd appreciate the ferry journey. It wasn't until we were back in Bangkok that we met a girl who had adopted a rabbit she found on Ko Samui... It was just roaming around the corridors of our hotel with it's little pink collar on while she fed it carrots, which was weird enough, and then it hopped right into our room and peed under my bed!!! Right on some feather earrings of Hannah's that had fallen down there too... Luckily (for the girl), we all saw the funny side! She was flying her home, I think to Norway but I can't really remember, that evening. I wonder if they made it?!

Although we've done a lot of lying on beaches in the time we've spent in Thailand, we have tried to be cultural too. Our quick trip in and out of Cambodia meant we could go and see the temples of Angkor Wat - the largest religious building in the world, which I had never heard of until Hannah read about it out loud from the Lonely Planet! Some people spend a whole week walking round the temples but I think a day was definitely enough for us. As awesome as they were, temples are very similar aren't they?! It was also just too ridiculously hot and humid for full rock appreciation - I think that day was the sweatiest I've ever been in my life. And that is not a record I want to beat anytime soon!

We were also pretty cultural in Chiang Mai, where we rode elephants and trekked through the jungle to a waterfall (which none of us swam in because the group before us told us they'd seen a massive snake in it!) where we ate pad thai out of banana leaves. We also did some disastrous white-water rafting that was included in the elephant package we bought which nearly saw us having to be rescued by helicopter! Basically the river just wasn't quite high enough for rafting, and our guide was younger than us, skinnier than us, and clearly not very experienced! We ended up getting stuck on a rock at the top of a rapid and teetering on the edge of it above a lot of very fast-flowing muddy water and a lot of very large rocks! Considering the fact we were wearing "safety" helmets made out of polystyrene, none of us were particularly keen when our guide suggested we all sat at the front of the boat to flip us end over end and into the rapid head first... We eventually managed to wedge ourselves between two rocks, which didn't help our predicament but made us feel a lot more stable! After a lot of yelling, jumping up and down, getting stuck in a tree, we finally got ourselves free and made it down alive. It was one of those things that was only funny once we were back on dry land!

My only regret is that, despite having chased the sun around the world for the past six months, we are not going to be returning home particularly tanned as it has been raining torrentially most days for the past two weeks! In fact I imagine most of you will be browner than we are as I hear the weather's been fantastic in England recently >>>> I just checked the weather forecast and surprise surprise it's going to be raining when we return!

Looking forward to seeing you all :) Hxx