The last chapter Nearly 8 months on and we are set (kind of) to return to England. We cannot wait to see the cat. Oh and family and friends too of course! It'll be interesting to see how quickly we adjust to normality again; job hunting has already begun and Matt has even applied for one job already. Although this hasn't been completely on a shoe string, for the most part it has been a very low budget trip. For the cost of a regular new car we have had 8 mo...

Happy Songkran! On Friday we left Pak Chong and flagged down a Bangkok bound bus on the main street and arrived in Bangkok's north / north eastern bus terminal two and a half hours later. We queued up for a taxi-meter and realised we didn't have the address of our hotel to offer our octogenarian driver. We set off regardless. We had decided for the last few days of our trip to check-in to a nice hotel - the Amari Atrium and eventually, with the help of a traffi...

A day in the rainforest We left Nong Khai on Tuesday morning, and becoming very au fait with Thai bus stations, we boarded a bus to a place called Khon Kaen. This is about a third of the way between Nong Khai and Bangkok. We spent just one night here to break up the journey. Then on Wednesday we took the bus from Khon Kaen to Nakon Ratchasima and did a quick swap at the bus station onto a bus heading for the town of Pak Chong. An hour and a half later we were d...

Enjoying our north-eastern experience On Saturday we packed up and left our Chiang Khaen guesthouse. We walked the kilometre or so to catch a sawngthaew to a village called Ban Tad, about 40 minutes away. We arrived and were dropped off in the middle of the village with no hint of a bus stop anywhere. We managed to establish, thanks to the help of a few friendly locals (none of whom could speak English) that we had to wait under a tree at the side of the road. ...

Enjoying the sights We headed out of Chiang Rai on Monday on the 10.30am bus to Sukhothai. A fairly uneventful, long journey. We arrived at around 6pm and negotiated a taxi type pick up truck to our hotel. It was about a kilometre out of the town slap bang in the middle of a residential area full of wooden houses ranging from fairly palatial-looking to downright ramshackle. On the Tuesday we caught the bus into Sukhothai old city. We hired bikes and spent a l...