Christmas Eve and where will you find us, Tesco Lotus of course buying Christmas favourites, Baileys and Ferrero Rocher. We build a "Tree" with the help of our hotel TV and tinsel and place our 100 baht presents for each other underneath, Santa would be proud. He might not leave us any presents this year but we may find him on the beach in the morning knocking back a bottle of Singa and Turkey fried rice. Merry Christmas from Koh Samui, Thailand! 30 degrees and...

One thing you have to do when you get to Hanoi is leave it. For a couple of days anyway, and make a little four hour detour to Ha Long Bay (which literally means 'descending dragon bay'). We booked the trip through our hotel on the Ha Long Party Cruise. Woo hoo!! We were the first to be picked up and on our way to pick up our fellow party animals at their hotels, we had our first taste of police corruption when they came on board and insisted that the driver pa...

After leaving for Vang Vieng at 7am what followed was 3 days of drunkenness. Armed with our 'Tubing gear' and Ray bans (I mean Ban Rays) we headed for our tubes. In hindsight you don't really need tubes, a mistake we learnt on the first day as all our tubes where stolen and we lost the deposit but still an experience you should do once. First bar, 'Q Bar' with a free shot of something nasty (Lao Lao) and a bracelet. Mix this with a few beers, vodka buckets, mor...

Whilst in Luang Prabang, we decided to visit an elephant sanctuary, so along with Fran and Graham, we headed to Elephant Village Sanctuary & Camp. Our guide for the two days was Joy, or as we like to call him, Peewee. He was tiny, bless him, but always lived up to his Joy name and never stopped smiling. Once there we got on our elephant Mae Cot, along with our Mahout (elephant trainer) Mr Pan, and took a stroll along the river. Rachel would be happy to admi...

After a restless night fighting of giant mutated cockroaches (ok, it was just the one cockroach, but it was huge!) we got on a long boat to take us down the Nam Ou River, joining up to Mekong River to our next destination, Luang Prabang. The journey took about 6 hours, not including the stopover at Tham Ting Buddha Cave. The cave is filled with literally thousands of Buddha statues, ranging from a few centimetres high to, well, the very big. Sarah was not able ...