We were all set to leave Pai and catch a bus back to Chang Mai, however Sam's aversion to buses and a case of sickness meant I relented and splurged out on a 'taxi'. In actual fact it was money well spent, rather than a minimum of four tortuous hours, we got there in two. We were both really excited to be back in Chang Mai as we'd arranged to meet up with Marsha, one of the girls we'd done the trek to Machu Pichu with and who was now also in Thailand. We had a...

We arrived in Pai and set about finding a place to stay. We walked around for about half an hour checking a few places out, with our big packs getting heavier & heavier and unfortunately being a pretty indecisive mood. A Dutch women then approached us and said she had a hostel & it was only 200 baht a night (about 3 pounds for both of us). It turned out to be a really cool old wooden house, with a lounge with DVD player, a kitchen we could use and an OK bathroom....

Rather than just heading to some gorgeous sandy beach and staying there for a month, we decided to be a bit more adventurous and head up to North Thailand and hopefully absorb a bit of the real Thailand and visit some hill tribes, see some remote Wat's and immerse ourselves in Thai life. We then plan to find that gorgeous sandy beach when we go back down to see Sam's dad !. Afterall we don't want to return to England without a tan !. Our destination was Pai, a ...

We left Cairns at about 1300, but then had to fly 2000km's the wrong way back to Sydney, then fly back over the country and onto Bangkok. We eventually arrived in Bangkok at about midnight only to find our bags hadn't arrived with us ! We went and spoke to the people responsible, they assured us our bags would be delivered to our 'hotel' by 0900 the next morning, the only trouble was they wanted the keys to the padlocks we had on our packs, so they could take the...

We arrived in Bangkok at about midnight, being fairly used to this travelling lark, we'd pre-booked a hostel, so jumped in a taxi