I arrived in Chiang Mai around 4pm. I'd been feeling a bit rough over the last few days and the 6 hour bus journey hadn't helped. I booked into a guest house and got dressed for a night out on the town. Minutes after digging into a veggieburger (my first in over 3 weeks!), I was back in my hotel room, praying to the porcelain Gods from 8pm till midnight. I was pretty sure it was just a case of Delhi Belly, but I wanted to be sure it wasn't dyssentry or malaria o...

Day one of the Gibbon Experience: We met our trekking group - 6 Thai women who work for the government. They were realy nice, but unfortunately it wasn't the same as doing the trek with travellers - who we generally had much more in common with. We started off with a 3 hour trek and took several zip wires around the jungle - i'll upload videos soon. The zip wires were definately the highlight of the trip. Some were well over 150 metres in the air and were extre...

We woke up early this morning to cross the Mekong into Laos and to clear immigration. Unfortunately, it was absolutely pissing it down. We checked in with the office who was organising our trekking the next day. We were told that since we had 14 kilometres off-road before we got to the village where our trek started that we may have a 7 hour trek in the rain if the 4x4 couldn't make it. We hid in our guest house room until night. The place was completely dead -...

We got up early to grab some breakfast with Mark. Unfortunately, his passport hadn't turned up yet so he couldn't join us on the way to Laos. We took a minibus up to Nam Kong and spent the night there. We met heaps of people on the bus and chatted to a couple of cool English girls till' late.

We woke up after an appauling night's sleep next to the waterfall and went on a 2 hour trek to the bamboo rafting. It was a greuling trek up and down steep hills, sometimes with extremely high drops. One slip and it'd be game over (there's no concept of health and safety in thailand)! We finally reached the river and jumped on some rafts. I was on the back, helped to steer whilst Mark and Emma sat in the middle of the boat. We went down rapids past elephants an...