The day after the night before was not a fun place to be particularly for Rachelle who had an epic hangover. It is sufficient to say that it started and ended in hot and humid hotel rooms split by several hours spent in airports while I alternated between nursing Rachelle back to health and handing out large amounts of cash for airport food & drink. So we arrived in Krabi town grumpy and tired and ready to transfer out to one of the islands for our taste of paradise.

Life on the island over the following 5 days only seemed partially real. I expect it was the heat and humidity along with the utter lack of pressure to do anything but the hours seemed to crawl forward as if we were living in warm treacle but the days seemed to fly by. Our hotel must be partially to blame for this of course as it had a comfortable restaurant overlooking the sea, a lovely pool, a private (if rocky) beach and most importantly an air conditioned bungalow to retreat back to in the heat of the day.

It seems pointless to give a chronological series of events when even now they all seem jumbled up in a warm haze but here are a few of the things we got up to:

-Scuba, Rachelle is now a qualified open water diver, feel free to have a congratulatory drink for her. I spent one day scuba diving off an island called Ko Ha and Rachelle went back to Ko Phi Phi the following day to finish off. We can now go diving anywhere in the world together and we have already spotted a place in Vietnam we fancy, cheers Mum & Dad. As for the diving I have no real comparison for it but it was pretty amazing, and none of the fish gave a monkeys about us, not even the barracuda or sea snakes.

-Moped, not our most glorious day, we hired a moped and drove around the island but it fell over with us on it when we stopped on a muddy bit so we got very mucky, other than that it was just like Easy Rider.

-Thai Massage, we both got an hour's massage for a ridiculously small amount of money and although at times it felt more like physiotherapy than massage we both felt fantastic afterwards.

Other than that we did very little, books came and went, we went swimming in the sea (and Rachelle managed to fall on the rocks I mentioned earlier - no lasting damage), I hired a pedal bike and went riding at 1pm (not my best idea) and the beach bar got a mild hammering. In short we had an idyllic tropical island beach holiday to relieve all the stress and tension which we didn't have in the first place.

So enough of all this luxury, it's off to Vietnam and some authentic traveling experiences. Rachelle has agreed to slum it for a couple of weeks before Bobo arrives to travel with us in Cambodia so in the next update expect tales of bugs on skewers, rats eating our shoes and random attacks by Marxist monkeys. Of course Vietnam will almost certainly be as lovely as Thailand but we are prepared to roll with it. Until next time ladies and gentlemen, a good night to you all.

Love A & R