Tom: So in 24 hours time we'll be in Bali - the southern hemisphere. It's a nice feeling to know that we've made it through a month and a half of traveling now, with our own tales to pass on to other travelers, rather than listening in anticipation to everyone else's stories. It's almost like we're proper travelers! It's also good to be moving on, I feel we're pretty much done with mainland South East Asia. We've had our temples, elephant rides, trekking and our...

Nilufer: Sorry (mums and dads) for the lack of blogging over the last week, we didn't write because, honestly, we didn't have much to report! We took it really easy in Hanoi, no rushing about. In fact, we did the thing that backpackers aren't supposed to do... we had a western day where we went to an amazing, air-conditioned, super fancy cinema multiplex and finally watched Avatar 3-D, we ate popcorn, drank coke and for a split second missed home! It was an...

Tom: Alright peeps? We've just finished trekking through the jungles north of Chiang Mai (in Northern Thailand). One of the highlights of our first month of traveling so far. The train journey from Lop Buri to Chiang Mai was 12 hours long overnight. On a third class train. On a bench. With no sleeping facilities. That was not cool. What was cool though was just before we finally arrived we met a Swedish girl (Therese) doing pretty much the same thing as us. So ...

Nilufer: Hey everyone! Tom and I are now in Lop Buri, which is a lovely sleepy city filled with 6th-12th century temples, and the main attraction, a temple overrun with monkeys. We've just come back from the monkey temple, and it was just incredible. It was like walking around the film set for Planet of the Apes... the monkeys were everywhere - they own this place! And not just the temple, but the surrounding area too. To be honest it was a little scary, be...

Tom: So we arrived on Koh Chang island after another irritating border crossing. Not sure if I'll ever get used to these but at least they're pretty safe in South East Asia (unlike horror stories of African crossings we've heard from other travelers). Koh Chang (Thai for "Elephant Island") is awesome. As you can tell fro the pics we've obviously done the elephant ride - and so far it has been the highlight of the trip - even better than Angkor Wat as a...