Diving with Roctopus!

One of the guys we met on Koh Phangan just happened to work for an awesome (and very small) dive company called Roctopus Dive so we checked them out and booked to do our SSI open water course with them which would allow us to dive anywhere in the world!

Now any body who knows me knows that I'm petrified of the sea and have not been in the sea above my knees since I was little. It has been an aim of mine to conquer this fear whilst we were away and after 4 dives to up to 17m I can well and truly say the fear is conquered!

We started off with some theory and a pool session then on day 3 we were off out into the big blue! The weather was admittedly pretty poor and so the visibility underwater was not great either, we could prob see a max on 3 meters which also probably meant that we did not see as much as we could have but what we did see was pretty amazing! We saw lots of different types of coral and clown fish, angel fish and trigger fish and parrot fish, all of which are amazingly coloured, as is the coral and the plants that grow on it!

We had a videographer following us around on the last day so she did a lovely (albeit expensive) video as proof of our underwater adventures!

Bring on more diving in the rest of our trip!

Steph x

The Moon is Bright!

Chiang Mai really was a magical place, the weekend markets were brilliant and we managed to get involved in another kings birthday.

But the full Moon party was calling so we booked our selves onto a night train to Bangkok and started a 43 hour journey down to the Thailand Islands. This consisted of two night trains, a coach and a boat! A tiring experience that saw us not change for three days... we got used to the smell after a while!

Koh Phangan was an interesting experience, we decided to head over for the Full Moon party as we'd met so many people that were going and thought as we're here why not?

We stayed about 20 mins drive away from Had Rin (which looked like Malia), where the party takes place, in a really nice bungalow resort with our own private beach, perfect!

The party itself was insane! We rocked up not really knowing what to expect. The beach was great fun filled with bars offering various types of entertainment but the main theme being fire! Lots of people with twirling sticks on fire and the main but scary thing was a massive skipping rope on fire for the public to jump! As you can probably imagine we gave this one a miss - well I nearly went in but a bloke before me fell on his face on the rope - ouch!

The night was a great laugh filled with buckets and dancing, we bumped into a group of lads who were staying in our resort who turned out to be a good laugh. We also saw the lunar eclipse, well we didn't know what it was until the morning but the moon looked awesome!

Whilst Steph and I were taking full advantage of the ultra violet paint we met a group of lads who turned out to be dive instructors on Koh Tao (our next stop) and gave us some advice for when we get there!

Next stop - the sea!

Lets get our Trek on!

So the two day slow boat turned into a three day travel session, this was helped by our boat breaking down on the 2nd day meaning we had to spend the night in a small town right across from the border.

Once we got into Chiang Mai our epic journey was worth it as we met the nicest landlady to date. The staff at Libra Guesthouse really couldn't do more for us and it was topped off when we booked a 2 day trek through the guesthouse. This was brilliant and it was shared with a couple from America who had recently retired, I hope I have an ounce of their energy when I retire. Hugh and Lynne were great to be around especially as Lynne wanted to know everything about where we were so we learned so much about the local villages.

The trek started with a trip to a 50ft waterfall then onto a hot spring. The water was so hot I could only stand in it for a short time but it was really cool to see it.

We then took a 9km trek through the jungle across three mountains. This is the most exercise we've done since we've been here and it was quite hard going. (It didn't help that we had a little bit of a hang over from doing pretend Karaoke into phalic shapped carrots with some random Thai people the night before!) We saw some amazing views though!

It was a welcome sight when we got to our camp for the night with the most basic bed ever and the guide cooked us the most amazing massuman curry!

The next day 2 obviously tame but otherwise free to roam elephants rocked up to take us on our trek, but first we got to help wash them and Mike had an unexpected bareback ride! We then jumped onto a bamboo raft which we thought might be boring... until we got to the rapids and had to hang on for dear life!




The trek was all in all amazing and gave us some awesome memories!

Luang Prabang you beaut!

After the carnage that was tubing we set out to Luang Pabang. What a joy that was, if only we could of stayed there longer. A beautiful city with really nice people and a lot of coffee shops!

We bumped into Sean and Katy who we met in Hoi An and spent a day with them touring around the town, we found a rickety bamboo bridge that you had to pay to cross as the locals have to rebuild it every year. On the other side we went into this really nice open air restaurant, we originally were just going to have a beer but decided to stay and have the beef fondue! It was brilliant and a great way to spend the day with Sean and Katy hearing about their adventure and what they're doing next. We then went to see a temple which was 300 odd steps up a hill in the center of town, it had the most amazing views and added to our now many sunset pictures.

The next day we joined an activity day which started off with a morning mountain bike. The bikes were a bit rubbish and we had issues with our chains but it was good fun anyway, the views were brilliant and topped off when we got down to the river and jumped into a kayak, five minuets later we were at the bottom of the most incredible waterfall we've seen so far which had a group of elephants in the bottom section. This was a bit touristy and I was sad to see the elephants being hit by their keepers but I guess this is how they do it here. We then jumped into the kayaks and had a very extreme 3 hour boat ride, well kind of extreme!

Luang Prabang was so much fun, we really didn't want to leave but Chiang Mai was calling so we took a 2 day slow boat up the Mekong river towards Thailand.

Mike and Steph