Koh Tao - Koh Phan Gan

Well it's been a little while and we have packed a lot in...the rest of Koh Tao we spent visiting different beaches, view points and of course restaurants! Oh yeah Claudia almost got attacked by a monkey in Koh Tao - it was huge and on the back of a bike, we went to look at it and it literally almost gauged her eyes out! Never seen anyone so scared before!! Relaxed and prepared for a week of partying in Koh Phan Gan! The boat ride over was gorgeous, calm seas and perfect weather. We arrived and booked into our little bungalow and went to enjoy the sun by the pool. Lots has happened while we have been here:

> First night beach and a mad pool party - watched some fire throwing on the beach with a bucket of alcohol, headed to the pool party with a random entourage of people who followed us there - lots of dancing and meeting new and bizarre people!

> Spending lots of time by the pool or on the beach in the day listening to good music, enjoying fresh fruit shakes and reading lots of good books.

> Valentine's Day - great meal - seafood platter, everything you could imagine from the sea barbecued to perfection! Followed by lots of dancing on the beach - fireworks, lanterns, fire dancing!

> Half moon party! blooming amazing, party in the middle of the jungle, loads of great people, U.V. everywhere you look, the best fire dancing we have ever seen! Great music and partying into the night! Managed to get home at 4am...

All in all Koh Phan Gan has been good to us...next stop Koh Samui!!

Vang Vieng - Koh Tao - No snow in sight!!!

Well well we are staring at pure lucious white.....SAND, ha ha oh well we are sure it's fun in the pure lucious white snow! Anyway back to our adventures...

Last few days in Laos were perfect, sun, tubing, good cheap food, music and fun...We hung out a lot with the Sakurah girls JoJo and Amy and bid them a fond farewell before we headed off...destination Vientianne(the capital of laos) which is on the border of thailand. We had a supprisingly quick journey and ended up in this bizarre place. We spent the next couple of days at the Thai embassy and it took 4 hours to hand in and pay for our 2 month visas, but at least it will mean we wont have to do any border runs. It only cost 20 pounds which is not to bad. It is so annoying now they have changed the law - if you travel into Thailand by plane you get 30 days but if you go by land you only get 15 days so if we wanted to spend 2 months there we would have to do about 3 visa runs....

Vientianne is not the most inspiring of places, quite unappealing in terms of architecture and not much to do - as you would normally find in a capital city, so we wanted to leave there and get down south as soon as poss....

So visas in hand we literally travelled for days...travel to Bangkok stayed for the day (swimming pool and stocked up on some retail therapy) and then more travel to get down south....so all in all 48 hours of travelling, no sleep!! But we are here now and it is beautiful...koh tao, it really is such a gorgeous little island. We found a great place to stay, its got its own little beach at the end of the long beach and its this great fancy hut on stilts, we managed to haggle the price down to half as we said we are staying till next wednesday...so we are paying 600 baht a night instead of 1200... the people are really nice who own it and they help out with anything and the food is ridiculously cheap and amazingly fresh, so in all we are paying 3 pound a night each for this luxury place in the perfect location and to make it even better meals are about 80p its a pretty quiet island as most people who come here go scuba diving, so they are all out in the day and then to tired to go out at night, its so nice and relaxed and just what we needed after 4 days of pretty much no sleep....