I believe by now we may have visited Khao San Rd more than Oxford St and we were not keen on making it home any longer than necessary. An early start saw us join the fairly extensive queue of would be travellers outside the Myanmar Embassy, luckily a relatively painful process we ticked all the boxes and headed back to town to occupy ourselves before a 3pm visa collection. With some local advise we jumped on a rather fun but extremely overcrowded BK river boat and headed back to the embassy. Visas in hand and smiles on our faces we headed to the bus station, our chosen destination Pattaya, Thailand second biggest city and as we were to find out a rather hedonistic playground.

As it turns out you can travel for about 3 hours on an air conditioned local bus for as little as £1. The public transport is heavily subsidised by the Thai government to reflect a relatively poor population. Pattaya's population is composed of 100,000 locals, 10,000 Russians, 5,000 Chinese, 5,000 geriatric love seeking western males and about the same number of prostitutes. Koh Pi Pi it is not! Our best accommodation deal was a £10 room above a brothel a stones throw from the beach, one night was enough and the following morning we took a ferry to the island Koh Larn, expecting an untouched tropical paradise we instead discovered a beach totally covered in sun loungers which in turn were totally covered in Russians! Backpackers hell! We secured a great room for the night and made the most of the beach the following day before heading back to the mainland for the ???? Festival. We dropped our bags at our chosen hotel and took a walk down the infamous Walking Street, occasionally a pub or restaurant could be found in between the strip clubs, go go bars and brothels but they were rare, lady boys, drag queens, contortionists, stilt walkers they had it all! We settled on the beach after a stroll through the market and watched lanterns by the hundred float over our heads interspersed with fireworks. Moving to the pier for a beer we navigated are way through the go go bars and found a large bar with a great view, it was only halfway to the table before we realised our company for the night were sugar daddy's and prostitutes not a table apart from our own was prostitute free! We sat amongst the rabble and enjoyed a lively conversation focussing mainly on who these people were and what were their stories all this whist lanterns and fireworks continued to fill the sky. Our last evening almost over we quickly grabbed a seat ringside at a go go bar for a spot of Muay Thai, 2 knockouts and a polite refusal from Martin to jump in the ring we called it a night. A complete assault on the senses and a very different side of Thailand to anything we'd seen before we'd had fun but once was probably enough! Well at least for emily, there was a possibility Martin could return 40 years from now!!!