From HK we had a slight detour to Manila and Boracay to catch up with Denise and Tim, Phil's parents!!! We didn't have much time in Manila, but the insight we got is that there is a crazy amount of people there, there's a lot of poverty and the traffic is CRAZY!!!... We were up after about 3 hours sleep then to fly down to Boracay, which is a beautiful island south of Manila. …we were taking a chance heading down there as its typhoon season!!! We had a fabulou...

First up was the madness of Mong Kok, where our accommodation was…it is pure craziness, with people everywhere….luckily it's a great location, with shopping, transport and good food right on our doorstep...now we have had a few small rooms in our travels but this one really takes the biscuit….it was about 6 foot by 7 foot, so we just about had enough room to sleep in…luckily there was space under the bed to keep our bags!!! During our first night walk we ...

So we had a nice painless border crossing into Thailand and headed to Chiang Mai. We didn't do a whole lot while we were here, just visited the night markets and hired a motorbike to drive up to some waterfalls, the big lake and a temple at the top of a hill, which offers great views over the town. We then booked our overnight train down to Bangkok that would get us into the city at 8.30am….this should have been a fairly simple journey, but as our last long ove...

There was no rest for us as we had booked in to do the one day elephant Mahout training at the elephant village....first we got an introduction to elephants and what the project here is doing. The situation there is that once the elephants aren't being used for logging anymore they are abandoned and as they don't know how to fend for themselves or get enough food to survive they die...so this project aims to rescue them and lightly use them for tourism as a way t...

We woke up concerned about the weather as it was lightly raining, but once the trek started we realised that we had other bigger concerns...namely the 20 river crossings we had ahead of us, that we hadn't been told about...in fact one couple had been told that there was distinctly no water involved in the trek!!! (For Shane, change concern to adventure!!!) As we are travelling in wet season the river was fairly strong and high...just to add to the fun of the day!...