CLUB . . . You're wrong and you don't even know it !

Well, I'm back now and it was a brilliant holiday, once we finally got there. Our original flight was cancelled which meant we had to wait for 3 hours whilst the inept staff tried to put us on buses to be driven to a hotel. Finally at 3AM they had managed this and we were driven for 10 minutes to the Holiday Inn which is actually in the Airport/NEC complex and to where we could have walked in 20mins if they had said where we needed to go, which they didn't.

That done with we arrived in Bangkok and spent 2 days there driving around on river taxis, sampling the Khao San Road and riding the skytrain. Then we took the train to Ayahuttha which used to be the capital of Thailand. We spent 2 days there cycling around looking at all the Wats ( temples ) and that was fun. One night I got to meet Elic Clapton who turned out to be 50 year old Thai geyser with whom I enjoyed a few drinks.

Next we got a minibus to Kanchanaburi which is built on the river Kwai and only a couple of miles from the famous Bridge Over The River Kwai. Whilst there we rode the Death railway built by the Allied POW and visited a war museum which contained a lot of accounts of the prisoners and drawings and pictures of the conditions they had to put up with. I think it's fair to say no film I have seen gets anywhere even close to the full nastiness portrayed in this museum. Also we went up a very picturesque waterfall and swam in some of it's pools despite the very real danger of small bitey fish which nibbled at our toes. I don't think my brother and I would have gone for a swim at all were it not for a sweet German girl who spent ages and ages gingerly wading in and running out but who finally got herself a big stick to hit the fish with if they bit her and eventually went for it. We didn't want to be shown up by a sweet German girl and she didn't appear to be being eaten so we had to go in too. Once we did it was fun and the fish didn't bite whilst you were moving, if you stopped for a second they would start again. We sat under the waterfall and the German girl came over and said "I have dream of sitting under waterfall, I go now to have dream" which I thought was funny.

From Kanchanaburi we took a variety of forms of transport to get to an island called Ko Chang negotiating a lot of fairly unpleasant touts and taxi drivers on the way. In the end we got a taxi from Trat to the ferry port for 40 baht each, we thought it was only a couple of minutes drive and had negotiated the driver down from 120 baht and we still thought we were being ripped off. It turned out to be a 35 min journey and in fact we had got an amazing deal on the price. We arrived at night and it was pissing down with the rain, the place we were going to stay was fully booked so we had to hike up huge steep hills for almost an hour to find somewhere else to stay. The next day it also pissed down torrentially so I organised some diving for the next day on the off chance it stopped raining. Luckily it did and we had a brilliant day diving. There were only 4 of us and the dive master, my 'buddy' was a german lady called Gaby who was a pretty good diver and the other 2 were basically novices waving their arms about like maniacs and not really looking at anything around them much. Gaby and I saw a stonefish trying to hide on the bottom and got lost from the main group on more than one occasion but luckily we were both on the same wavelength and eventually managed to find them again each time ( vis was only around 10M ). For our final day we hired a car, an automatic one - quite weird to drive and drove around the island, walking around some mangrove swamps and accidentally strayed into a thai village built on stilts above the mangroves where everyone was sitting around mending their nets and sorting through pots of unpleasant looking crabs and stuff.

Then the holiday was over and I came home.

If anyone is interested in seeing what Thailand is like there are some photos here, once I've added all the ones I took there will be a lot of them ! http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmdrgravy/sets/72157605721339347/