The Adventures of Paul, Sadie and Daisy Moo too!

Our journey to Trang was just by an uneventful minivan. It took 3hrs and for some unknown reason even though they go past where you want to get off (the train station), they say they must drop you at the bus terminal that’s 4k outside of town. A short tuk tuk journey back and we arrived at our next guesthouse called Mittree. It was another aircon cave with no windows and a foul-smelling bathroom but it had a comfy bed and the guesthouse is perfectly located next to the station. After a quick cool down and change, we were out to investigate the town. First stop was a craft beer place Paul had found for me just round the corner called 92 bar & studio (the studio being a tattoo parlour upstairs). They had a great choice of beers, all sadly expensive but I had a very nice Coconut Cream ale and Paul had a Chang lager and we sipped these in the cool bar surrounded by film paraphernalia, quirky board games, arty skateboards and listening to David Bowie and the like blaring from the s

Hard to believe another 8 weeks have passed since I did the last recap of our travels, and it's now been 16 weeks since we left Nottingham. So now we're pretty much a third of the way through our adventure already! The last 8 weeks have taken us to - Mandalay Hsipaw Bagan Inle Lake Yangon Mawlaymine Golden Rock Hpa An Phuket Ko Pha Ngan Ko Jum Ko Lanta Trang Tomorrow we leave Thailand after a brilliant and pretty relaxing time of it here, and head south into Malaysia. Our planned itinerary there is Langkawi, Penang, Ipoh, Cameron Highlands, Kuala Lumpur, Tioman Island and then onto Singapore. We will then probably cross over to visit the Borneo side of Malaysia, Brunei and then into Indonesia.

We had pre-booked our ferry ticket from the Andaman Resort the previous night whilst having dinner, which is the same place where we got off the boat earlier in the week. Our hostel bloke gave us a lift down in his motorcycle/side-car taxi in plenty of time, so we got some breakfast whilst we waited for the ferry to arrive. Ko Jum is around the half way point between Krabi and Ko Lanta, and the 2 boats pass by at a similar time, and the first to appear was the one going to Krabi, so we had a little longer to wait. Suddenly we got a shout to get into the longboat, so us and another couple got in and we were soon speeding out to meet the ferry for yet another sea transfer. Thankfully we all managed to get onboard without getting wet and we headed off towards Ko Lanta. Not long after we left, Sadie asked me if I had paid for breakfast, which I hadn’t as assumed she had paid whilst I went to the toilet before we left. But she also assumed I had paid whilst she went to the toilet,

Travelling days normally consist of the stressful reorganization of the backpack, followed by grumbles of why things aren't fitting in as before, a tense waiting period where you wonder if your booked transport will arrive and finally a hot, sweaty, slightly confusing journey where you really don't know what's going on but hope you get to your next hotel. It was much the same on this day as we left Krabi town for Ko Jum - a peaceful island an hour boat journey away.  Mild panic set in as the mini-van was over 30mins late to collect us from the hotel, turns out we didn’t really need this bit as the jetty was only 5mins walk away but we didn’t know that as all internet resources had told us it was miles away. Having arrived at the crowded dock you are given stickers denoting where you are traveling to and then you wait huddled in the pockets of shade with about 50 other people. The boat arrived and all luggage was shifted aboard, they tried to keep it in two separate pil

Getting from Patong Beach to Ko Pha Ngan involved a long day of travelling via taxi – bus – ferry – taxi, and we had decided to book this through a tour company based in Patong to save a few hundred Bhat. We had booked this on the understanding we would get picked up from our hotel by minivan, then dropped off at the Bus Terminal in Phuket Town, board the 9am bus to Donsak Pier (near Surat Thani), then catch the 3pm ferry arriving at Ko Pha Ngan around 5pm. What really happened is we got picked up as expected on time by a minivan, then we collected a few more people from various other resorts on the island. However, by this point I realised we wouldn’t have made the 9am bus, and when I asked the driver, he said he was taking us to Surat Thani and then we would be taken to the ferry by bus. Fine, or so we thought as we drove the 3 hours or so up through some lovely scenery and without a stop, we pulled up at a restaurant/travel shop in Surat Thani. This was apparently to have our t

After a quick flight to Bangkok, another few hours wasted in the airport, then another brief flight we landed in Phuket. As we had decided quite late in the day to come to South Thailand we hadn’t done as much homework about locations as other countries but we thought we’d spend a week in Phuket and then plan everything from there. It would appear that’s it’s not that cheap in Phuket in March but the cheapest place was Patong, so that’s where we headed, we’d booked a hotel that was a fair distance from the beach and party places called Chusri Hotel which had the comfort level we’d decided we needed (aircon) at a slightly inflated nightly price of £25 inc breakfast. The room was big, with a full-sized fridge, huge bathroom and a small balcony, breakfast everyday was eggs, sausage, bacon with fruit and was nice, the staff however were as miserable as sin. It became a mission for me to get one of the girls to smile by the end of the week, I managed it, but I only got one smile the wh

After checking out the following morning, we got the bus from just around the corner from our motel after our host wrote out directions and the place name of Hpa-An in Burmese to help us out. It was an old local bus with no air-con, but luckily the front door didn’t close and windows could open, plus we got seats right at the front so the journey wasn’t too bad at all.    We arrived around 2 hours later in the town of Hpa-An which is in the Kayin State, and after a 5-minute walk in the mid-day heat, we reached the hotel for our last 3 nights here in Myanmar. The Galaxy Motel is near the centre of town and a popular stop off for travellers both arriving and departing due to its proximity of the border crossing of Myawaddy to/from Mae Sot in Thailand. That was our plan, to stay a couple days here exploring the area and then head over to Thailand before heading south. The drive up here had amazing scenery with lush green hills all around and lots of ridges with pagodas