its been a while since we last updated you all on our progress around thailand so i thought i had better put this travesty to right. from ao nang we headed to the island of Phi Phi. this is an amazing island that felt the brunt of the tsnami a year and a half ago. as a result, much of the area in which we were staying in was quite run down, however, rebuilding is in progress and the place is getting busier and busier all the time. there is an army of dive shops on the two most popular beach, 15 i was told in an area about the size of a football pitch! you cannot walk 5 minutes without a westerner asking you whether you want to go diving! as our next stop after Phi Phi was Phuket for our muay thai kickboxing camp we thought we had better actually see a fight so we knew roughly what were letting ourselves in for. thus, a night out ensued involving more 'buckets' meeting old friends from the full moon party, a number of games of pool and viewing a fight that left us quite confident about the weeks to come! the following day we got the boat to phuket. this hour long trip was, quite possibly the worst journey i have ever made in my life. very choppy seas and an already weak stomach...i shall stop there. we arrived on phuket island, a favourite for package holiday destinations and eventually made it to the kickboxing camp. after being shown our very nice bungalow we settled down to a spot of thai tele, not particularly impressive stuff though. the following day we hit the gym at 7:30 for a what turned out to be, very punishing first session. skipping, boxing, bag work and about 300 sit ups later we crawled bac to the house and slept! glutten for punishment we headed down to the afternoon session aswell. more of the same took place and after a day we were feeling like hardcore kickboxers already, except lacking any kind of skill and in the most amount of pain ever! the whole thing has vastly improved and i am down to one session a day, infinitely better and it means i can move the following morning. still, perhaps one of our most interesting and thoroughly annoying experiances has to be the first day we hired the scooters. motorbikes are the primary way of travelling in this part of the world and since our camp is a bit of a walk from anywhere we thought we should hire some bikes for the day and check out the surroundings. so we hopped on our 110cc scooters and whizzed off down the hill, only to be stopped by the local police force at the roundabout, roughly 2 minutes from the camp. the following occured: bobby 1: can i see your driving licence please? ( however, in thai english-not so easy to understand but we got there) tim: er, i dont have it on me, its at our hosue just up the hill. bobby 2:can i see your licence please? james:mine is also up the hill. shall we go and get them, we'll be 2 minutes. bobby 1: absolutely no way. you MUST have your driving licence on you at all times. here is a ticket each. leave your bikes here and go to the police station and pay the fine. so, hit with a whopping 300 baht fine (about a fiver) we got back to the bikes and drove away. over here you can only be charged for doing something once in a day. once we had our receipts from the police station we could wave them at any other local law enforcer who tried to stop us for not having a licence and he would usher us on our way, no harm done! strange!! anyways, thats enough from me for the moment, must head off to the perfect beach around the corner with warm blue water, clear blue skies, brilliant white sand..... james