Tuesday 21st July 2009

We arrived in Pai at around 6pm and walked towards the river to find some accomodation, the first place we found was fully booked but the place next door had rooms which were cute little cabins so we decided to stay there. After checking in we were both really tired (self inflicted from last night of course) so we decided to have a nap for an hour but the next thing we knew it was 21.30pm whoops!!! So after getting up we went across the road from where we were staying to an italian resturant and had a quick bite to eat before going back to bed we must being getting old we can't cope with these late nights anymore.

Wednesday 22nd July 2009

After having a lay in this morning we went to book a white water rafting trip for Thursday, once we had booked that we went for some lunch before heading out for a walk around Pai. We headed out of town towards the waterfall which the sign said was 7km away which we didn't think was too bad, after we had been walking for 50mins a French girl stopped us and told us it would take us 3 hours to get to the waterfall as for alot of the way you had to walk through the river and as it was already 3pm we decided to abandon that idea. We did carry on walking for a bit and had a paddle in the river where we met two english girls who had had the same idea as us but had also changed there minds due to how long it would take to get to the waterfall. After we had all had a paddle we all walked back into town to have a drink but we also ended up staying for dinner as well. After dinner we went to use the internet and to ring mum before getting an early night as we were leaving for our white water rafting trip at 07.30am in the morning.

Thursday 23rd July 2009

Today we were picked up at 07.30am after having a coffee and sorting out the equipment for white water rafting we then got back into the van for another one and half hour drive to the start point. We started rafting at 10am stopped for lunch at about 12pm and didn't finish until 6.15pm it was 45km in total we were very tired by the end of it. It was a bit disapointing as the water was so low as they hadn't had much rain in the last few weeks so the few rapids that they had were quite small and the river wasn't running very fast therefore it was hard work rowing. It also didn't help that we had 3 very lazy people in our boat who didn't really want to row so that made it even more hard work but hey hoo we got there in the end. We finished rafting at around 6pm, and then we had a very long drive back to Pai we didn't get back untill 9pm. Once we got back we went for dinner and then went to bed two very tired girls.

Friday 24th July 2009

This morning after getting up and packing we checked out about 12pm and went to book our bus back to Chiang Mai the earliest we could get was 13.30pm. So we went for some lunch before getting the bus, this bus was much better than the one we got to Pai thank goodness. We arrived in Chiang Mai at about 5.30pm hoping to get a bus straight to Koh Tao but after hearing that it took two days and you had to go via Bangkok anyway we decided to get the train to Bangkok unfortunately we'd missed the sleeper train so we had to settle for 12 hours on a seated train. After booking our tickets the train didn't leave until 9pm so we had two and a half hours to kill, so I had a shower at the train station (not the most desirable of showers but a least I smelt better) while suz had a drink, we then had some dinner before getting on the train.

Saturday 25th July 2009

Today has to be the worst day of our trip so far!!!

We arrived in Bangkok this morning at 09.30am with the intention of getting another train straight to Chumphon staying overnight there and then getting the ferry to Koh Tao first thing Sunday morning. With some further advice and some gentle persuasion from tourist information we ended up booking the bus and ferry combined ticket to Koh Toa unfortunately this didn't leave until 7pm so we had an exciting day at the train station ahead of us!! After getting some breakfast and us both using the showers at Bangkok train station we decided to go and update the blog as we had some time to kill. After we had been in there for nearly two hours they had a power cut so we both thought we'd lost all the update luckily when the computers came back on most of it was still there but then the internet crashed so we couldn't save any of what we had done we could have cried. We saved the update to the hard drive and went for some lunch and kept going back and forth to the internet cafe to see whether the internet was back on it never was so after two and half hours of trying we decided to print what we had done and try and find somewhere else. When we eventually found somewhere else we only had an hour left before we needed to be back to get the bus so it was all very frustrating to say the least. We got on the bus at 7pm and it got to Chumporn at 2.30am in the morning and the ferry wasn't until 7am so we all got of the bus into a room with mats on a concrete floor until 6am (It wasn't actually as uncomfortable as it sounds). At 6am we got on another bus which took us to the ferry port for the ferry at 7am, the ferry took two and half hours so we eventually arrived in Koh Tao at 09.30am both looking forward to a proper night of sleep tonight!!