Hello again, well we have had a bit of a change in our travel plans. A few days ago we were in Vientiane, trying to book a bus to Hanoi in Vietnam. The bus was due to be a local bus for 24 hours, and was fully booked. For some reason we then made a snap decision to return to Thailand and Malaysia rather than visiting Vietnam. This may be a mistake and I'm sure we'll regret it in years to come, however it felt right at the time and after a few days on some beautiful beaches we're not really regretting our decision yet!

The first stop was Bangkok and on this, our third visit, we saw a different side to the city. We spent some time in the commercial district looking around some very fancy shopping centres imagining we were rich enough to buy something. Given the state of our clothes after 6 months of travel I'm surprised they let us in at all, and with this in mind we began a bit of shopping to make oursleves a little more respectable. We have been very very careful with our money so far, agonising over every baht/ dollar/ ringit etc and strangely once we started shopping we couldn't stop. We ended up in Tesco Lotus buying a portable DVD player, then hopping back to the Khao San Road for some very cheap DVDs. With our new toy we got about 30 pounds worth of Tesco Lotus vouchers which we had to use there and then. It took over 3 hours to spend the money as we had to choose things which were lightweight, useful and cheap. Each department had a separate till and we were not able to get any change so it became quite an ordeal. Eventually we decided to spend our last 500 Baht voucher on a bottle of wine, only to discover you cannot buy alcohol in the afternoon, so we ended up with Harry Potter DVD (the only available English Language film).

That evening we took another night bus to Koh Phi Phi in the south, guess what film was playing on the bus! Koh Phi Phi is a tiny and very beautiful island. We spent two days admiring the crystal clear turquoise waters, soft white sand and a huge array of brightly coloured tropical fish. When we eventually had enough of taking in all this beauty we had a house building competition with each other using dead coral. We got some strange looks. Jon won, but only because someone knocked my miniature house over.

We have now spent a few more days on another beach in Krabi, and will be returning to Malaysia tomorrow which we're looking foward to a lot.

Love to everyone, from Sarah and Jon