Monthly Archives: December 2012

Koh Tao Christmas

This was my most bizarre Christmas to date. It started horrendously…

At 6.15am on Christmas Eve we got off the night train from Bangkok at Chumphon, on the coast. Failing to get a sleeper we had to sit in seats for 7 hours, which wasn’t too bad- although Matt only got half an hour’s sleep. At the station torrential rain was lashing down, and luckily a woman from the ferry company was running around herding people up to get on the bus to the pier because we had no idea where to go. Continue reading

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Transport review: elephants vs. trains

This is what it looks like when an elephant treads on your foot:

Fortunately Matt was spared a more dramatic injury since we were in a river an hour outside of Chiang Mai washing said elephants at the time, and his foot sank into the sand below. Still, its massive toenail left an impressive mark. I was unaware of these developments as I was trying to tame my elephant at the time: being a young one it became overly excited when we reached the water and dived in head first. Whilst the others were sitting nicely letting their owners for the day give them a nice scrub, ours was rolling around with its legs in the air. This took place once we had learnt the basic Mahout commands necessary to ride the elephants, then fed them a gargantuan amount of bananas to sweeten them up to us doing so. Continue reading

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Cambodian inertia

The Nha Trang effect has struck again- 4 or 5 days in Siem Reap has turned into a mammoth 11-night stint. Our original plans to head up to Laos once our parents left from their two week holiday were immediately thrown out when we saw the horrendous journey we’d have to take: 10 or 11 hours on multiple buses just to get to the border, far away from where we needed to be. Instead, we decided to wait it out here until our Thai visas started…

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