Tuesday 17th July

We woke up early and got picked up and headed to the ferry port, I was pleased to see that this pier was a lot quieter and there was no mad scramble for the tickets or boat!

We arrived on the main land and jumped on a bus to take us to another bus. The last bus took us to Phuket where we were dropped off to take a taxi to our hotel.

The taxi driver tried to charge us more after he realised where we were going, but we refused and said it was his mistake not realising where we were going.

We drove past the main hub of Phuket, very seedy and not very nice! Luckily we are staying a million miles away down a quiet street.

We are staying here for two weeks for Stu do to some MMA (mixed martial arts) and to do some exercise.

Our little bungalow was nice, good air con and the bathroom was interesting with a lot of foliage! We also found we had a family of mice that liked to steal our toilet paper and have races in the roof of the bathroom. But they didn't come in the bedroom so I was ok with that!

The training camp was good, it had some really good facilities and the trainers were good.

Wednesday 18th July - Tuesday 31st July

I am not going to give a running commentary of how much I wanted to die while training!

It was hard work, especially training outdoors in the heat! I did enjoy it, sort of! We had a training day on the beach one day, which was a lot harder which involved a lot of running on the beach. It also didn't help that the tide was coming in so apart from getting sandy we got soaking wet too! Luckily that day it was really cloudy and no sun!

But the general trend was sleep till about midday, have lunch, train between 3 - 4 pm and Stu did some more after, come back wash, eat and sleep!

The training was hard though, a lot of circuits of push ups, sit ups, burpees, squats etc. It was not very enjoyable at the time, after five months of not doing anything it hurt!

On the Saturday 25th, the training centre had a BBQ and some fights between the students. It was a good night and the fights were good. The women were worse than the men in my books!

After the two weeks we were ready to move on, we had plenty of exercise and rest that we wanted to get moving again!

We booked boat tickets to Phi Phi and found a hostel, since it is summer holidays for most people finding accommodation is tricky!