16th November

We rolled into Bangkok train station at 6am, just as the sun was rising. As we'd booked our tickets late we ended up with top bunks right next to the toilets, which pretty much meant we had a rough and smelly nights sleep.

Jumped in a taxi and headed back to the Rambuttri Village hotel, the same one we'd stayed in last time and slept......slept a lot!

When we finally surfaced we spent the rest of the afternoon/evening taking advantage of the roof top pool, buying last minute souveniers/presents and exploring streets that we hadn't already.

In true backpacker fashion we'd spotted that the internet cafe beside us offered free interent from 1am until 4am. Sure enough at 1am we were parked up making the most of it - we thought we'd be the only ones in there but it was full with other cheapskates like us! Still, it gave us a chance to catch up on this blog (which, is very very time consuming!).

17th November

We were up late due to our mammoth late night internet session. Checked out of the hotel and dumped our bags in storage. Went and posted my (what Paul now hoped would be the last) parcel of the trip and promptly spent a small fortune on shipping it back to solihull!

We now had 11 hours to kill until our bus to the airport at 11pm. So we spent the rest of the day doing yet more wandering and sitting in cool coffee shops. Randomly bumped into Jurgen (the Dutch guy who we'd met in Siem Reap) on Khao San Road and arranged to meet him for a cheeky beer at 8pm.

Time goes quite quickly when you aint doing much! We grabbed some Pad Tai from one of the street vendors for the very last time and headed to meet Jurgen. However, when he arrived he looked decidedly worse for wear and explained that he'd eaten something dodgy - we sent him back to his hotel room bless him and and headed off to a bar and spent our last few hours in Bangkok people watching on Khao San!

Visa run time .....off to the airport!! .....

November 18th
After a solid one hours sleep in the airport for me (Laura had a good few hours nap!), we checked our bags in and boarded our first plane of the day. The 1.5 hour flight to Penang was over in a flash as we both pretty much slept the entire way. We then had a few hours to kill in the airport. After a bit of reading, a coffee and a cheeky McDonalds, it was time to board our second flight, this time to Kuala Lumpur. An even shorter ride later, and we had landed in KL. As our plane was late taking off, we only had a 30 minute gap between our flight landing and the next flight taking off, so we legged it to the next departure gate. As it turns out our plane was delayed anyway, but only by about 15-20 mins, so we boarded our third and final plane of the day. As we were descending over Phuket, we could see loads of tropical islands in the sea, it looked amazing. Also, Phuket airport is probably the nicest located airport I've ever been to. Its right on the beach, and almost looked like we were going to touch down on the sand when landing!
Kata beach, where we were staying is a good 45 minute taxi ride away, so to cut down on costs we shared a taxi with another girl from Brighton who was going to Phuket town. We didnt end up getting to our hotel until about 7:30, but it was probably the nicest hotel we've had all trip. Unfortunately the rooftop pool wasnt available due to them putting some chemicals in it or something, which was a blow, but apart from that, it was awesome. We were pretty shattered from the days flying, so had an early night.