The Islands of Hedonism and a Lesson in Avoiding the British! So I spent a very surreal Christmas in Koh Samui. In the absence of Christmas Eve in the 8 Bells with half of Dover, myself, Rachael and Hamish (both NZers) headed into Lamai town, where we sunk the typical island bucket of alcohol containing Red Bull, Coke and the Thai Whiskey Sangsom. We purchased ourselves a Christmas hat and absorbed the Thai Christmas atmosphere. Despite obviously not celebrating...

A Lesson in Loneliness So there I was in Thailand, alone and slightly terrified. My preoccupation with the train journey turned out to be completely unfounded as the trains were about a hundred times better than in India and I actually got a decent night's sleep. It took just over 20 hours to get to Bangkok and I travelled by taxi, train, bus, ferry and giant tuktuk (which act kinda like buses here) before I finally reached by hostel. I was thoroughly disappoint...

And so the last week passed by with normalities such as an elephant visiting the slum and Julie giving me a backy to the local beach to save me 300 rupees (the bruises lasted for days!). Suddenly it was the last day of volunteering, in which Vicky and I caused chaos by taking many photos of the children, making paper hats and giving them balloons to play with, thoroughly annoying the teacher! I was annoyed at myself for feeling pleased that it was over, for feeli...

Death by chocolate brownie... The following week followed much as the previous as we settled into the everyday routine of the camp. Some days were more successful, particularly when we came up with new and even more interesting verses (with particularly exciting actions) for 'Wheels on the bus' and anything to do with colouring and other days did not go so well (picture screaming, scratching kids). Stella and I found it much harder to get through to the older gi...

Hey Guys! Sorry it's been a while, I bet you've all been desperate for updates, hehe! So where was I.... Aha, the second day of volunteering went much as the previous, the kids grizzled away for hours, hit each other and drew on the walls. However, I began to notice the differences in the abilities of the children. Amazingly a select few actually knew all their alphabet and numbers and were able to write the entire thing down too. One kid particularly stuck out,...