Hello from Thailand! We finally made it here after a long, long trip from Cape Town. Our flight to Singapore was suprisingly enjoyable as it was filled with in-flight entertainment (Friends, Love Actually etc) and lots of yummy food and drinks. But this was short lived as we then had to entertain ourselves for 5 hours in Singapore Airport, cue sleeping on hard, cold, uncomfortable seats. We eventually arrived in Bangkok at 10am and were quickly ushered (along with all the other 'Farang') into the taxi rank. We had our first experience of an attempted rip off by our dodgy taxi driver who tried to charge us double the standard fare to our hostel. Needless to say Harri wasn't having any of it and stood her ground, especially after suffering severe sleep deprivation!

Our hostel, Hi-Sukhimvit, was a welcome relief as it was in a nice and quiet street but was still close to the sky train. We checked into our dorm, dumped our bags and decided to try and walk off the jet lag. We attempted to navigate the sky train which is not the easiest mode of public transport but definitely the cheapest! After asking numerous sky train staff and only getting lost once, we made it to Siam Square. We went into both of the shopping centres there, one was a more budget place with the other having all designer shops. Whilst we liked browsing the clothes in the designer shopping centre we were only too aware of our budget and looked but not touched! After wondering the shops for hours trying to tire ourselves out, Starbucks came as a welcome suprise.

The next day was New Years Eve and we just about woke up in time for the pub crawl! As we mentioned last time our original hostel in Bangkok (Soi 1) doubled booked us and so to make up for it we were invited along to their New Years Eve Pub Crawl, which we were only to happy to attend as our other plans consisted of a cheap bottle of a vodka in our dorm room. When we arrived at Soi 1 we tried to mingle and made friends with two really nice American girls, Cathy and Kelly. We teamed up as a foursome as we weren't too sure what David (the party crazy hostel owner) had in store for us...If only we knew! There was a group of about 45 on the pub crawl and we somehow managed to stick together on the sky train and made it to our first destination: Soi Cowboy. On this strip our first stop was Suzie Wong's where we all naively followed David into what looked like a standard Bangkok bar. How wrong we were! As we walked in we were shocked to realise it was a strip club filled with lots of completely naked Thai women. The girls all headed straight to the bar in need of a drink, whilst the guys got comfortable in the front row! We survived one drink there but after promises of a ping pong show we quickly headed out to another bar where the guys would later meet us. Our journey to the next bar was interrupted by an elephant roaming the strip. This was no night out in Camberley that's for sure! When we made it to Country Roads we ordered some drinks in preparation for the countdown. After welcoming in 2009 (or 2552 as that's the year here!) we were taken to various destinations but eventually arrived at Spicy, the place to be after 3am. We were lucky to make it there after we had our first very squished tuk tuk experience which was interesting to say the least! We had lots of fun drinking and dancing with our new friends and our eyes were opened to all the prostitutes and lady boys! We made it back to Soi 1 at 5am where we continued the party until we made it back to our actual hostel at 11am.

After lots of recovering (thanks to McDonnald's) we decided we should do some sightseeing. We got together with three other girls from our dorm room and headed for the water taxi to take us to the Grand Palace, Wat Pho and Reclining Buddha. In preparation we thought we'd covered up appropriately but were informed our clothes were too 'tight'. Thankfully we were able to hire delightful traditional skirts (notice no photo's are taken below the waist!). We thought the temples were stunning and spent a long time looking around them all. Our favourite sight was the huge reclining Buddha which was really spectacular. After we were all templed-out we got a tuk tuk to Khao San Road (a backpackers paradise) for some lunch and shopping.

The next day we left our hostel (too quiet) and went to Soi 1 Guesthouse because we knew it had a bar and a selection of dvd's. We went to Chatuchack weekend market, which is the largest in Asia. This was definitely no Blackbushe! There was plenty of interesting things to see and buy but we managed to restrain ourselves as by this time we had worked up quite an appetite and wanted a nice lunch.

The next few days were fairly quiet as we spent our time watching pirate dvd's and hanging out with people in our hostel. We met some English girls, Ellie and Lauren in our dorm and had a fun night out in Khao San Road with them.

Next we'll be going on a very long bus journey to North-Eastern Thailand to a place called Ubon Ratchathani. There we'll be volunteering in a rural Thai school, teaching English to the students and experiencing real Thai culture.