Oh dear, many apologies for the lack of blogging recently, it would appear me and Adds fell off the face of the earth for a few weeks.

After arriving in Kuala Lumpur we spent three days wandering around the city checking out the sights. One of which was the Islamic Arts Museum. This was actually pretty cool and was full of mini prototypes for various mosques etc around the world, very interesting. We have also spent many hours trawling Petaling Street (Chinatown) for everyones Christmas presents and also in search of scrummy street food. It's a strange road and you get yelled at by all the hawkers from every angle, it's so noisy. They sell chestnuts freshly roasted on the roadside, the smell is so evocative of being at home around Christmas. You have to keep your head up because you often see big metal poles being swung towards your head or fin a street sweeper spraying you with dirty water from all the fish guts everywhere, sound line fun? It is.

As planned we spent a day travelling overland to Krabi to meet Cat and Sam. Bit of a mission given that our coach got a flat tyre leaving us 3.5 hours behind schedule and consequently almost missing the border crossings opening hours. Lady luck however, was on our side and we just made it.

After arriving in Krabi we set off wandering the streets looking for our friends and after about thirty seconds saw them walking up the same street, it was a very exciting and emotional reunion having not seen them since July in Peru. As you can imagine we had tonnes to catch up on so we spent the entire evening nattering and drinking beers. We totally forgot about dinner and ended up on some poor mans lovely Thai long boat at about 3am, unbeknownst to him in a drunken mess. Breaking and entering, what has happened to us ha ha! The sea was awesome too as we discovered during our night swim that there was loads of glow in the dark plankton, so whenever you swam you were surrounded by little twinkles, beautiful.

The following few nights took on a similar routine but sometimes we replaced the boat with breaking into a posh hotel to use their pool in the early hours. Amongst all the slightly illegal activities we managed a bit of Thai food scoffing and checking out the town of Krabi.

After three nights we decided we were ready for Koh Phi Phi. The boat was fairly wet, bumpy and cold but still lots of fun was had, rescuing stranded broken down boats etc. When we arrived (along with about 300 other backpackers) we tried to find somewhere to stay but everywere was fully booked so we had to resort to wandering the streets begging for a room. Eventually we found a lovely s*** hole run by a miserable German lady and settled ourselves into our dirty beds in our stiflingly hot windowless rooms.

Phi Phi is a stunningly beautiful little island with a tiny town on it. It got trashed in the tsunami but is looking pretty good now considering, they ask eveyone who arrives on the island to pay a clean up fee to help out so that's quite helpful for them I'm sure.

We had a good few days of free parties on the island. The bars are in so much competition they can't charge for drinks until after 12pm, great news for us, we just stopped drinking at midnight (that was the plan anyway!). We had so much fun dancing all night on the beach, one night under a tropical rainstorm which was hilarious, even though all our clothes were ruined. The days on Phi Phi were spent wandering the town and markets and one day we took a long, sticky, mosquito ridden trek through some jungle to finally be rewarded with an absolutely stunning viewpoint over the whole island. It's so lush, green and tropical and it's all fenced in by it's aqua clear waters filled to the brim with multiple coloured wooden long boats.

After a few nights on Phi Phi we decided to move (in search of the sun) to the East coast of Thailand. We booked our tickets and embarked on a 16 hour journey by boat, bus, coach (very broken), night boat and then another bus! Phew! We arrived on Koh Phangan early in the morning on the 8th Dec just in time for my birthday. We found an amazing HOTEL, yes not hostel, we decided to live it up for a week. It cost the same amount as our lovely place on Phi Phi though so we didn't feel bad. I'm talking swimming pool, double bed, crisp white linen, free daily bottles of water, hot shower, fluffy towels.....heaven!!!!!!!

The plan was to chill that night and save ourselves for my birthday night. However, chilling turned into "may aswell have one bucket to see in Lizs birthday", which turned into, "we'll stay on the beach until Adds wins the fire jumping competition", and eventually "wow, how did it get to 8am".

So my birthday was celebrated well and truly in style (on the 8th) and on the 9th I had a brilliant day filled with balloons, chocolate cake for breakfast, feather tiaras to match my new red dress, a new purse and a beautiful meal out that night. The day was spent lying on powdery soft white sand and playing in huge waves in the crystal clear azure waters surrounded by palm trees and big boulders with three of my most favourite peole in the world! Can't be bad eh?

We spent the rest of the week in similar style taking each day as it came, swanning from one beach to another, riding long boats to out of the way destinations. One of the days we decided to hire two sooters between the four of us (each bike was £3 per day, soooo cheap) and we zoomed off in search of tropical waterfalls, which is exactly what we found. It felt so good sticking your head under the ice cold pummeling water when it was so hot and humid outside.

We finally said our goodbyes, again, to Cat and Sam, but not for long as we are meeting up for New Years Eve and then travelling the rest of South East Asia with them YAY!!!!

Me and Adds, a travelling twosome once again, were collected from our hotel at the lovely hour of 6am and continued with a taxi, boat, minibus, coach, three hour wait followed by a ten hour coach all the way back to Kuala Lumpur.

Our tropical spirit has been totally deflated as we sit here creating and testing spreadsheets ha ha, all in the name of saving money. The hostel owner asked us last time to help him set up his new hostel by creating an IT system for bookings, finances and other exciting stuff. We get free accommodation and food though though so it's all good. We are keeping a copy too for the future because you just never know it might come in useful to us one day.......!

We only have two days of work and then we fly to Bangkok to meet everybody for our huge family crimbo.....(minus a few special people unfortunately). That's if everyone can make it through the snow blizzard that seems to be cancelling flights and closing airports left right and centre in Britain, eek!! Fingers are tightly crossed.

OK adios for now, see some of you very shortly, some of you soon and some of you in 6 months.

Merry Christmas to you all, miss you lots.

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